Gravity 16

Work and context

Gravity 16 #224 spreads purple and magenta fans across a deep navy ground. Broad streamers radiate from a central concentration, opening into wing-like passages towards the upper right and lower left. Dark gaps separate those passages, so the image holds expansion and interruption together. This is the freshly verified AB5D collection example: its indexed owner matches one of the three wallets currently linked to the collector profile.¹²

Jimmy Herdberg’s Gravity 16 comprises 1,024 Factory works on Art Blocks, project 165. The official statement connects its fourteen themes with stages of thought, from beginning an idea through exploration, uncertainty, discovery, and eventual fading. That is an artistic framework for the collection. The program does not record neural activity, accept a viewer’s thoughts, or simulate cognition. Its visible complexity comes from lines interacting with a changing field of computational nodes.³⁴

The original rendering process is part of the work’s identity. Early and later views of #0 and #1 showed marks accumulating into much denser forms. Other inspected originals were already developed when first observed. They should not all be described as if their complete development had been watched. Code inspection establishes a finite drawing procedure, while the actual views establish that the current original-rendering path works and can reveal that procedure.⁴⁵⁶

Conception

In his account signed 20 October 2021, Herdberg traces the algorithm to December 2020, identifies Gravity 12 as its first working version, and describes successive releases through version 16. He names the addition of an exponential gravity parameter as a significant extension. The themes represent a personal model of creative work: passing beyond familiar understanding can precede discovery. These are useful statements about his working process, rather than a scientific account of how brains learn.⁷

The essay’s page contains inconsistencies worth preserving. Its header gives a March 2022 release date, whereas its body gives 24 September 2021, agreeing with Art Blocks and the mint record. It also introduces four palettes before later listing five categories. Neither discrepancy needs to be silently repaired into a claim of perfect agreement. For the mechanism, the full program is a more exact account of branches and parameter combinations than a retrospective category summary.³⁴⁷

A later exhibition gives the project another kind of context. Herdberg’s May 2022 account of Hemma Hos describes a four-hour exhibition in Sara-Lo af Ekenstam’s apartment gallery in Gothenburg. Gravity 16 #1010 appeared on a screen, while #943 and #697 were framed in white-glazed ash in the kitchen. The artist thus presented works from this collection as both screen images and physical prints, alongside other stages of his practice.⁸

That combination matters because the drawn result has its own visual completeness. Watching it form can make its decisions easier to perceive, but a late-state image still holds density, colour, and directional structure. The series is not exhausted by either a short demonstration of its mechanism or a catalogue thumbnail. Different presentations expose different aspects of the same rule-based work.⁴⁸

Construction

The entire 4,087-byte indexed artist script was read and its digest retained. It uses p5.js 1.0.0 with a square two-dimensional canvas sized to the shorter viewport dimension. A reference width of one thousand units governs stroke scaling. Thirty-two bytes are extracted from the token hash, and an initial portion seeds a custom xorshift-style integer generator. Those values contribute to palette selection, spin direction, hue adjustment, and the numerical configuration of the drawing.⁴

The token identifier also participates. After taking its remainder modulo ten thousand and subtracting forty-six, the program treats nonnegative multiples of thirty-five as a special selection path. Other tokens use hash-derived selectors. It is therefore inaccurate to describe the output as depending on the hash alone. The original token context contains both values, and reproduction must preserve that context.⁴

The code has fourteen numerical parameter rows and eight palette-selection branches. Some branches can select all fourteen rows; others address only thirteen or eleven. These rows set such properties as node population, mass range, start-position spread, curve lifetime, movement limit, colour mixing, rotation, and distance response. A theme is consequently a bundle of related behaviours, not simply a label attached to a common image after it has been drawn.⁴

Nodes have a position, colour, mass, and mutable state initially set to zero. For each line, the program chooses a start point and repeatedly computes contributions from the nodes. A node’s contribution depends on its mass, current state, and distance from the moving point. Some configurations use an exponent applied to squared distance; others use ordinary distance. Near-node conditions can blend the current line colour towards a node’s colour, change its state, alter the line’s remaining lifetime, or rotate the movement vector.⁴

The state can change away from nodes as well. Depending on the sign of the configured response, an apparent decrement can increase the value. In some rows a random condition skips node contributions. These details make the field history-dependent and selective. They also explain why the title should not be treated as a promise of a literal Newtonian solver. Gravity is a productive model for directed relationships here, modified to make particular images.⁴

The accumulated movement vector is capped, then added to the point position. It persists between lines rather than being freshly reset for every curve, providing another connection across the drawing’s history. Each curve stops when its remaining lifetime expires or when its point leaves the normalised square. The resulting vertices form the thin paths that become broad veils, dense knots, or almost solid-looking masses when enough of them overlap.⁴

Colour depends on more than a list of hues. The program chooses blend modes including multiply and screen, supplies translucent stroke colours, sometimes builds a background gradient, and applies a hue adjustment. Repeated overlap can therefore darken a light field or illuminate a dark one. The visible difference between a cloud-like black centre and fine luminous filaments is partly a difference in how accumulated marks combine.⁴

Drawing proceeds in batches with a roughly forty-millisecond scheduling budget per callback. A work counter decreases, and the sketch eventually calls noLoop. This is finite construction, not an endless animation. Its precise wall-clock duration was not measured, and the batching condition makes browser scheduling relevant to how progress is delivered. No custom input controls, audio, or resize handler was found. An autoplay original can show the initial build, then retain the resulting image.⁴

Mint and release

Art Blocks reports release on 24 September 2021. The fresh index gives 1,024 actual invocations and the same maximum. The first mint occurred on 18 September at 17:34:18 UTC; activation followed on 23 September at 21:09:55. The indexed start setting is 24 September at 16:00 UTC, the second mint at 16:16:02, and completion at 16:46:51.³

The second-to-completion interval is thirty minutes forty-nine seconds. From the start setting to completion it is forty-six minutes fifty-one seconds. These describe recorded milestones, not independently established periods of continuous public availability. The earlier first token’s purpose and any reserved allocation were not resolved.³

Unlike a bare current price field, the project’s sales notes explicitly describe a Dutch auction beginning at 8 ETH and stepping every five minutes through 4, 2, 1, 0.75, and 0.5 ETH to a 0.25 ETH floor. This is an official indexed description of the intended sale schedule. It has not been pinned here to historical contract states or reconciled against every mint transaction. The current indexed price of 0.25 ETH is reported separately, and no particular buyer’s paid price is inferred solely from a timestamp.³

Rights and preservation

The artwork’s reported licence is CC BY-NC 4.0; the project’s linked-terms field is empty. The named Creative Commons licence allows noncommercial sharing and adaptation with attribution and its other conditions. A reproduction should identify Herdberg, link the original and licence, preserve relevant supplied notices, and indicate changes. The NonCommercial condition concerns the use’s purpose, so collection ownership alone does not settle it.³⁹

No separate licence for the whole artist program was established. The version-specific p5.js library carries LGPL 2.1, which is distinct from rights in the generated artwork and artist-authored code. This package records the script digest and analytical findings without redistributing the raw artist program. The essay’s original prose is offered under CC0 independently of the artwork licence.⁴¹⁰

Preserving an original renderer and preserving a print serve related but different purposes. A print can preserve the visual result without reproducing its temporal build; the renderer can demonstrate how that result is generated but depends on token data, runtime, and browser behaviour. Herdberg’s documented use of screen and framed work supports keeping both possibilities in view. Pixel-for-pixel agreement across browsers was not tested in this research.⁴⁸

Four outputs

Gravity 16 #0 initially presented a pale thread tangle on beige. Later it had developed a deep purple-black central cloud, with green and gold haze at its margins and long, thin branching curves reaching outward. Some paths extend towards the square’s boundaries, making the dense centre feel connected to a much larger, sparsely occupied space. The change between views demonstrates that an early impression of delicacy can become substantially heavier as marks accumulate.⁵

Its centre is not a single filled silhouette. The surrounding threads and coloured haze allow the eye to read density as layered activity, even where individual paths become hard to distinguish. The edge is therefore crucial: it is where a mass resolves back into trajectories. This reading follows the observed output without assigning it a named theme that the retrieved token metadata did not establish.⁵

Gravity 16 #1 moved from a beige initial field to a dark navy fan or pleated flower-like form. Its broad irregular circular body contains pale channels with rounded ends, and its perimeter is edged with fine hair-like marks. A dense central pinch holds the expansion together. Compared with #0, the structure is more continuously folded: its channels look like spaces between tightly gathered sheets rather than isolated branches leaving a cloud.⁶

The flower comparison is descriptive, not a botanical claim. The program’s lines, node relationships, and stopping conditions are sufficient to account for a form that invites that association. Seeing its initially sparse state also prevents the later mass from being mistaken for a loaded photographic texture or a pre-existing image.⁴⁶

Gravity 16 #10 gathers magenta and black nested curls on beige. Numerous pale circular openings interrupt the central mass; a pink loop appears towards its upper left, while a detached blue-green, kidney-like loop sits lower right. Fine webs extend towards the edges. Its interior openings give the density a porous character, making enclosure and escape visible in the same small region.¹¹

Gravity 16 #20 reverses the tonal situation. White, pink, gold, and blue curves glow against dark navy around a central cluster, with circular dark holes inside it and long fine paths reaching outward. Compared with #10, the observed state looks less like a heavy filled mass. The luminous strands remain more individually legible, demonstrating the compositional consequences of colour blending as well as geometry.¹²

The held #224 supplies a further variation: purple-magenta fans spread into broad streamers with dark gaps between them. Its directional wings differ from #20’s more openly filamentary cluster. The five original views establish a useful range of densities and spatial organisations, but they do not amount to a census of the collection’s fourteen themes or palette distribution.¹

Significance and open questions

Gravity 16 makes a compact program capable of markedly different visual behaviour. Its variety is not merely cosmetic. Parameter sets change how paths move, how long they survive, which nodes affect them, and how colour accumulates. The collection connects those changes to an artistic account of thought without requiring each output to illustrate a literal stage in a neurological process.³⁴

The work also makes iteration visible on two scales. The artist developed successive versions of the system; each original then accumulates its own succession of paths. The held image and the four comparisons show the visual result of that second process, while the development and exhibition accounts place it within a continuing practice. Neither a short animation label nor a static thumbnail alone captures those relationships.⁴⁷⁸

Unresolved research questions:

• How did the stated auction schedule correspond to historical contract changes and individual mint payments?
• What were the first token’s purpose and any reserved allocations?
• What separate permissions cover the complete artist program?
• How do browser scheduling and display density affect drawing duration and fine rendered edges?