GHOST IN THE CODE

The work and its context

GHOST IN THE CODE is a 404-edition generative art series by Kazuhiro Tanimoto, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 323, in the factory category with heritage placement in the AB500 set.¹² Each output is a generative human face: a painterly, watercolor-textured portrait whose personality is fixed by the mint hash and whose expression keeps changing as long as the work runs.¹³⁴

The description frames the project in metaphysical terms: "This work is the product of a project to dwell undeletable souls on the blockchain. A system that generates human faces with different personalities and expressions from a minimum of code. After determining the personality from a hash, the face continues to change into various expressions. It is a living portrait, a fragment of minter's soul, forever adrift in the vast net."¹ The artist's own project page carries the same abstract and adds that the series was "Released on July 8, 2022".³

Tanimoto's dossier places the work inside a materials-research sensibility: born 1983 in Kanagawa, Japan, holding a doctorate in engineering and a background in functional-materials research, he treats "an algorithm as a material whose behavior must be observed, tested, and refined".² The dossier records three Art Blocks 500 works by Tanimoto: Memories of Digital Data (450 editions), GHOST IN THE CODE (404 editions) and Wabi Sabi (205 editions), with a collector-metric ranking of 73 of 308 artists in the set, and notes a 2026 solo exhibition, Rain Blooms, at NEORT++ in Tokyo.² The series runs on p5.js 1.0.0 at a square aspect ratio with zero external assets, carries the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, and its artist script is 13,925 bytes.¹⁵

Conception and development

The conception is an argument about how much code a person is. The description builds it from a biological analogy: human DNA carries about 3 billion base pairs, "about 750 MB of information", and the difference between individual people "is only 0.1%, or 750 KB", a slight difference that "creates all kinds of differences in appearance and physical functions".¹³ Against that measure Tanimoto sets his own compression result: "I succeeded in expressing the personalities, emotions, and complex feelings of various people with 14 KB of code."¹³ The measured script is 13,925 bytes, so the "14 KB" claim is a rounded decimal-kilobyte figure for the actual on-chain code.⁵

The description then turns the analogy into a provocation. "We like to think of humans are supernatural and one-of-a-kind. This is a common background to the past, when many people favored the Ptolemaic theory. However, this work leads us to suspect that we humans are only a program that can be coded."¹ The artist's answer to his own question, what distinguishes DNA code from programming code, is "whether the execution space is real or digital space", and he insists the conclusion is not pessimistic: "the soul, the function that makes us aware of our existence... certainly dwells in the code."¹

Crucially, the mint is part of the work: "the ghost is output on the net by minting. This act is part of the work. The personality of the ghost is also determined by the hash owned by the minter. In other words, the ghost output by you from the code on the blockchain is a fragment of your soul."¹ The artist's page reinforces the medium specificity: in Art Blocks "the program code that generates the art itself is stored on the blockchain", unlike conventional platforms that store finished media on servers and only certificates on-chain.³ No project-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty, so the conception account rests on the description, the artist's own page and the script.¹

How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug ghost-in-the-code-by-kazuhiro-tanimoto and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 323. The retrieved script is 13,925 bytes with SHA-256 digest 82a34a501a5faed37406bc0588d23135cc841b6f49d1eda0c13ee0ac5af488f6, and it was read in full.¹⁵

Randomness comes from a dual sfc32 generator: two instances are seeded with the first and second 32-character halves of the chain hash, warmed up with 500,000 iterations, and alternated for every draw through an r_d() method.⁵ The code is minified, so no literal identifiers such as "face" or "eye" survive; the reading of structure rests on the program's control flow and on the observed outputs.⁵ The personality, the fixed facial geometry and palette, is derived from the hash-seeded draws, while a frameCount-driven layer varies the expression continuously over time, with noise functions modulating the features; the draw loop never halts (no noLoop call), so the portrait keeps shifting indefinitely.⁵

The description documents two keyboard controls: "Press C to turn canvas on/off" and "Press S to save image".¹ The live renderer confirmed the contract on token 323000067: the reported hash matched the chain record, the canvas rendered at 1000 by 1000 pixels, frames captured at 5, 25 and 55 seconds all differed as the expression moved (frameCount advanced from 0 to 85 to 205 under software rendering), and no audio or video elements exist in the page, so the work is silent.⁶ The two documented keys were not exercised in the probe run.⁶

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows a brief public sale after two pre-activation mints.¹⁷ Edition 0 was minted on June 8, 2022 at 10:57:58 UTC and edition 1 on June 9 at 20:35:12 UTC, both to the same address, two days and one day respectively before the project was activated on June 10 at 23:01:22 UTC; these are pre-activation artist-side mints.¹⁷ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads July 8, 2022 at 16:00:00 UTC, the official collection page carries "Released Jul 8, 2022, 4:00 PM UTC", and the artist's own project page likewise records "Released on July 8, 2022".¹⁸³

The public sale ran about half an hour: the AB5D treasury's edition 67 minted at 16:29:39 UTC, edition 200 at 16:30:26 UTC, and the final edition, number 403, at 16:31:24 UTC, about thirty-one minutes after the announced start.¹⁷ The minted count equals the maximum of 404, and the project is marked complete, locked and active.¹ One registry flag stands out: paused reads true even though the project is complete, the second such case in this batch; no inspected source explains the flag, and it is recorded as an open exception.¹ The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.¹ The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 67, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.⁷⁹

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC 4.0" for GHOST IN THE CODE, with the terms URL recorded in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC 4.0.¹ The CC BY-NC 4.0 deed grants the freedoms to Share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to Adapt, remix, transform and build upon the material, under two conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; and NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes. The deed also forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.¹⁰

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.⁵ The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the p5.js 1.0.0 library noted in the script type.¹⁵ Owning a GHOST IN THE CODE token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.⁷

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.⁶⁴

Edition 67 (token 323000067, minted July 8, 2022 at 16:29:39 UTC, half an hour into the sale), the AB5D-held header, is the gentlest of the sample: a pale pink-white ground carrying a watercolor-textured face with sharp cyan eyes, dark scribbled brows and a red nose region, the features loosely drawn as if in wet pigment.⁷⁹⁴ In the live view the portrait kept breathing: frames at 5, 25 and 55 seconds all differed as the expression shifted, the living portrait of the description made literal.⁶

Edition 0 (token 323000000, the pre-activation mint of June 8, 2022) is the darkest: a mottled deep olive-red ground, a somber face with green eyes emerging from the murk.⁷⁴ Edition 1 (token 323000001) turns pixelated: a face assembled from pink, green and purple blocks with dark red eyes, the painterly texture replaced by a coarse digital grid.⁷⁴

Edition 200 (token 323000200) is the loudest: a fluorescent green and purple-grey ground under a grid texture, the face staring out through red eyes.⁷⁴ Edition 403 (token 323000403, the final mint) fragments further: white and purple blocky pixel patches, cyan eyes and scattered blue fragments, a ghost half-dissolved into the net.⁷⁴ Across the five, the constant is the gaze, two eyes of saturated color anchored in an unstable field, and the variable is the medium mood, from watercolor softness to hard pixelation.⁴

Significance and limitations

GHOST IN THE CODE is the batch's most direct philosophical statement: a 14 KB program that argues, by existing, that personality is compressible and that a soul can be a hash away.¹⁵ Its thirty-one-minute sellout, its artist's engineering-doctorate framing of code as material, and its placement as one of three Tanimoto works in the AB500 set make it a compact document of the 2022 moment when on-chain generative art carried metaphysical ambitions without irony.¹⁷²

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the July 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.¹
• The registry's paused flag reads true although the project is complete; no inspected source explains the flag.¹
• No project-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty.¹
• The script is minified, so the face-drawing semantics were read from control flow and outputs rather than from meaningful identifiers.⁵
• The documented C and S keyboard controls were not exercised in the live probe; only the autonomous animation was measured.¹⁶