# Gizmobotz by Mark Cotton

## The work and its context

Gizmobotz turns a square into a cabinet of nine moving devices. Each circular compartment has its own colour and a different arrangement of lines, eyes, rings or rotating parts. Some compartments read immediately as faces. Others resemble instruments whose purpose is obscure. The black ground keeps these separate performances together without supplying a scene in which the characters could walk or meet. [^S05] [^S06] [^S07] [^S08]

Mark Cotton's first Art Blocks project appeared in the Factory category in July 2021. Its official description introduces clusters of nine bots, individually animated but coordinated within a group. The current edition contains 1,000 works. The program gives that characterful description a specific structure: nine routines are selected from a larger repertoire and placed in a fixed grid. The bots are drawing procedures, not autonomous agents with goals or conversations. [^S01] [^S02] [^S03]

The [Mark Cotton dossier](https://ab5d.xyz/artists/mark-cotton/) provides a broader practice context. Here, the important relationship is between a recognisable cast and an unstable moment. A token preserves the choice and arrangement of its devices, while their orientations and internal colours continue changing. A still image records the cast but only one instant of its performance. [^S02] [^S05]

## Conception and development

Cotton's October 2021 account of his next project, Space Birds, looks back on Gizmobotz as a playful work with quick movement and comic faces. He explains that he wanted the subsequent project to pursue a different, more traditional artistic character. This retrospective establishes a deliberate contrast within his practice; it does not make the earlier work an unfinished version of the later one. [^S03]

In the same essay, Cotton describes a general working method that develops through experimentation and decisions prompted by intermediate results. His account moves between physical art, music and code. It is useful evidence of an exploratory practice, but the specific shape-and-contour experiments discussed later in that article concern Space Birds. They should not be reassigned to Gizmobotz merely because both projects use p5.js. [^S03]

The deployed script suggests a modular design process: each named bot occupies a separate function, while shared routines choose colours and placement. This is an observation about the finished implementation, not proof of which bot Cotton invented first. No complete prototype sequence or dated development log was recovered. [^S02]

Names such as Clockwork, Waterpump, Bones and Angrybot provide different ways of approaching the same basic geometry. Some name a mechanism, some a familiar object and some an expression. The repertoire therefore moves between abstract motion and personification. A rotating line can be an instrument hand in one compartment and part of an animated face in another. That reading follows the named routines and visible examples without assigning an undocumented influence. [^S02] [^S09]

## How the work was constructed

The script begins by reading four eight-character hexadecimal chunks from the supplied token hash into an array of unsigned integers. A bitwise pseudorandom routine updates that state and returns a fractional number. This sequence supplies the shuffling decisions. The project description calls the input a transaction hash string; the program itself consumes tokenData.hash, which should not be casually substituted with the separate mint transaction identifier. [^S01] [^S02]

Setup establishes thirty-two named bot functions and thirty-two hexadecimal colours. Separate descending shuffle loops reorder both arrays. Drawing uses their first nine entries, so a cluster contains nine different selected bot routines and initially nine different palette entries. Some individual routines add their own fills, transparent overlays or other palette references, so those initial assignments do not describe every colour visible in a compartment. [^S02]

The canvas is square, sized to the smaller browser dimension. Nine vectors provide positions in three columns, and a common scale expands that arrangement into the display. For each position, draw paints a coloured circle, calls the corresponding bot function and restores the drawing state. The ordering proceeds down a column before moving right. This matters when relating source-array positions to the platform's top, middle and bottom feature labels. [^S02]

The routines use ordinary geometric primitives: lines, ellipses, arcs, rectangles and triangles. Tumblers builds a set of incomplete concentric arcs under successively changed rotations. Lattitudes draws short parallel-looking line segments with accumulating rotations, allowing a striped arrangement to become a tangled-looking structure. SquareDance and CircleDance place repeated nested shapes around several nearby centres. Their density comes from overlap and relative movement, rather than a photographic texture. [^S02]

Other routines deliberately suggest faces. Twisty rotates dark slits within pale oval eyes. Angrybot places rotating crosses inside square eye sockets above a mouth-like region. Bones draws a white skull and orbiting bone shapes. Vinyl adds concentric rings and small lettering to evoke a record. These are separately authored procedures, with their own line weights and timing multipliers, rather than one generic face assembled only by changing facial features. [^S02]

Four small connector motifs occupy the spaces between groups of circles. They combine crossed lines, rings and coloured centres. Their small dots call the pseudorandom generator during drawing, so randomness is not exhausted when the initial cast is selected. These connectors visually tie the cabinet together, but the code does not show the bots sending messages to one another. Their coordination consists principally of sharing a canvas, palette, render cycle and overall arrangement. [^S02]

Motion uses frameCount for many rotations and millis for colour interpolation over repeating time intervals. Several routines also maintain state, including line positions or stroke thickness. Because frame progress and elapsed time are different measures, identical wall-clock screenshots across browsers are not established by the token hash alone. No full common repeat period was measured, and the original should not be replaced with an invented short loop. [^S02]

The runtime is p5.js 1.0.0. The entire 34,630-byte artist script was read from the official index and hashed; it was not retrieved against a pinned blockchain block. Five original generators were opened to inspect automatic animation. No artist-defined mouse or keyboard handler, audio generation, or external image-loading call was found. Sound was not auditioned, so the visual inspection does not claim an audio experience. [^S01] [^S02]

## The mint

Art Blocks dates the public release to 17 July 2021. The index records an earlier first token at 23:38:13 on 7 July and activation at 01:46:37 on 11 July. Its second mint and start field both indicate 17:00:05 on 17 July, followed by completion at 22:54:19. The first token, contract activation and release thus belong to different moments. [^S01]

The interval from second mint to completion is five hours, fifty-four minutes and fourteen seconds. Art Blocks' contemporary newsletter, published on 4 August, describes the project as open for nearly six hours. The agreement supports the broad sale chronology, while the exact calculation remains tied to named index fields rather than an independently classified list of public purchases. [^S01] [^S04]

That newsletter reports $14,000 divided among local charitable causes, including domestic-violence assistance and cat shelters. This remains an attributed contemporary report. The individual recipients, conversion rate and transfers were not audited for this essay, and no present-day valuation is substituted for the reported amount. [^S04]

The refreshed index shows 1,000 invocations, a maximum of 1,000 and a price setting of 0.085 ETH. These establish current indexed values. Without original sale configuration or an announcement, the price cannot be presented as proof of what every minter paid, and the maximum cannot establish whether an earlier limit differed. Artist, reserved and public allocations remain unclassified. [^S01]

## Copyright and licensing

The current artwork record names CC BY-NC 4.0. The corresponding Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International legal text permits reproduction, sharing and adaptation for noncommercial purposes, subject to its conditions. Those include retaining supplied attribution and notices, linking the licence and indicating modifications. It does not grant unrestricted commercial use or imply the artist's endorsement. [^S01] [^S10]

The metadata supplies no licence hyperlink, so the matching official Creative Commons text is provided directly. This reports the presently named terms; a complete history of earlier project licensing was not recovered. No separate artist-program licence was identified in the inspected script. The p5.js dependency has its own LGPL 2.1 text, which should not be mistaken for Cotton's artwork licence. [^S02] [^S10] [^S11]

AB5D currently holds #78, whose owner matches a wallet in the freshly retrieved collector profile. That ownership supports the collection caption but does not transfer copyright. The original prose here is dedicated to CC0; the artwork and software retain their separate terms. The header uses the original remote renderer with Cotton's credit, a token link and the artwork licence link. [^S09] [^S12]

## Close reading of four outputs

The comparison uses editions 0, 1, 10 and 20, verified as tokens 105000000, 105000001, 105000010 and 105000020 on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. Each original was inspected at separate moments. The early-edition selection is a practical comparison, not a survey of the frequency or rarity of particular bots. [^S05] [^S06] [^S07] [^S08]

In #0, a deep-blue face at the upper left confronts a pale lime nest of circles at the upper centre. The face has strong dark eyes and a blunt horizontal mouth; the neighbouring CircleDance is much less stable as a single figure. At one moment its overlapping rings suggest a tangled rosette, while a later state gives the routine's superimposed nested squares more prominence. The pair establishes two kinds of recognition within the same circular frame. [^S05]

The lower centre contains Vinyl, whose fine concentric rings and tiny central lettering reward a closer look. Nearby, the lower-right face appears framed by sharp radiating black wedges. The middle-right Angrybot changes its eye crosses and internal colour between observations. A viewer can read #0 as nine portraits, yet several compartments resist that description. The grid makes unlike procedures comparable without making them identical. [^S05]

In #1, the distribution of recognisable faces is different. Its top-centre Twisty and bottom-centre Angrybot establish a vertical conversation between two expressions, while the remaining compartments offer rotating arcs, line structures and small orbital forms. The bright blue, red and green upper row has an immediate graphic force. Beneath it, warmer and softer colours alter the rhythm without changing the grid's spacing. [^S06]

The fixed circles are especially important here. They give the eye stable boundaries as the internal marks turn or change colour. Looking from the top-left Lattitudes to the top-right Tumblers contrasts a changing network of straight segments with a family of interrupted rings. Both are rotational drawings, but one can appear knotted while the other retains a clear concentric organisation. The difference lies in the construction of each routine, not simply its hue. [^S06] [^S02]

Edition #10 places SquareDance at the top left, Atomic at the top centre and Cyclotron at the top right. Its middle row includes FourEyes, Tumblers and Bloopy, bringing explicit facial readings closer to the centre. The lower row combines PieFace, Twisty and Waterpump. This arrangement makes the repertoire's mechanical and comic vocabularies visible together rather than dividing them into separate kinds of token. [^S07]

Edition #20 moves CircleDance to the upper left and puts Lattitudes in the middle. The blue Bones compartment at middle right supplies a conspicuous white skull, while BoxDance at the upper right concentrates attention on four rotating squares. The recurrence of known routines in new positions allows comparison across editions: identity persists, but neighbours and colours change the emphasis of each small performance. [^S08]

## Significance and limitations

Gizmobotz gives variation a legible scale. The grid stays fixed, the repertoire is finite and each routine has a recognisable behaviour, yet their combinations and simultaneous movement prevent the whole from settling into one definitive image. Its humour depends partly on treating a face, a record, a skull and an abstract mechanism as equivalent members of the same animated cabinet. [^S02] [^S05] [^S08]

The held #78 makes this equivalence especially clear: a skull, a clock-like device, dense square patterns and broken concentric rings occupy equal circles. Across two observations, their internal orientations and colours change while their positions remain stable. Preserving the live renderer therefore preserves a central part of the work's organisation, rather than merely adding motion to a static illustration. [^S09]

Unresolved research questions:

- Recover initial pricing, original maximum and reserved or artist allocations.
- Identify the prototype sequence and development dates of individual bots.
- Audit the contemporary charitable report against named recipients and transfers.
- Establish any separate artist-code terms and earlier artwork licensing history.
- Compare the indexed program with a pinned chain retrieval and test playback timing across environments.

[^S01]: Art Blocks / Mark Cotton. [Gizmobotz project and exact indexed record](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/gizmobotz-by-mark-cotton). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S02]: Mark Cotton. [Gizmobotz artist program](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S03]: Mark Cotton. [Inspiration for and Development of Space Birds on ArtBlocks.io](https://medium.com/@markcotton_81658/inspiration-for-and-development-of-space-birds-on-artblocks-io-560af0d1a6a9). Published 2021-10-08. Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S04]: Druid / The Link, Art Blocks. [Update: Charity on Chain, 300k to 2.3 Million](https://medium.com/the-link-art-blocks/update-charity-on-chain-300k-to-2-3-million-7c5682e3ac7b). Published 2021-08-04. Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S05]: Mark Cotton. [Gizmobotz #0](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/105000000). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S06]: Mark Cotton. [Gizmobotz #1](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/105000001). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S07]: Mark Cotton. [Gizmobotz #10](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/105000010). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S08]: Mark Cotton. [Gizmobotz #20](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/105000020). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S09]: Mark Cotton. [Gizmobotz #78](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/105000078). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S10]: Creative Commons. [Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International legal code](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.en). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S11]: p5.js contributors / Free Software Foundation. [p5.js 1.0.0 licence](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/processing/p5.js/1.0.0/license.txt). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S12]: Art Blocks / AB5D. [AB5D current collector profile](https://www.artblocks.io/profile/ab5d). Accessed 2026-09-18.