Imposter Syndrome

The work and its context

Imposter Syndrome is project 390 on the Art Blocks contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. The index records 100 invocations against a maximum of 100, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 3:4, the vertical "presents" and the licence label CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ¹. Art Blocks now lists it in the Presents category of Art Blocks 500 ², the platform's closed canon of 500 projects drawn from its Curated, Playground, Factory, Presents and other lines ³.

Each output is one flat shape, a circle, a rectangle or a triangle, laid over a field split in two by a single straight edge. Two copies of the shape sit just behind it, offset in opposite directions. Each copy is painted in the colour of one half of the field, so it shows only where it crosses into the other half ¹. The result is a shape with a shadow that changes sides, and a shape that seems unsure which world it belongs to.

The artist's statement makes that reading explicit. "I feel like an imposter," it begins, "Pseudo-anonymous as ippsketch while maintaining an engineering career and family life" ¹. He calls the series "an expression of my seeming dual existence", adds that it "leans into minimalism", and says he is "drawn to broken symmetry" ¹. The project record also commits "25% of primary sales" to Community First Village in Austin, Texas ¹.

Conception and development

ippsketch is the working name of Jeff, who describes himself as "a mechanical engineer" who uses "code and simulation" in his job and "enjoy[s] sketching with code" ⁴. The Art Blocks artist page places him in Austin and describes "thoughtful minimalist compositions" ⁵. Cortesi Gallery explains the name as "i++ sketch", after the programming increment operator, and names Sol LeWitt's wall drawings and Vera Molnar as influences ⁶.

In a 2023 interview with Accompart's he said that painting with code "gives me the precision and repeatability my engineering brain craves" ⁷. He described his tools as "Grids, sine waves, and dynamic equations" ⁷. His first Art Blocks project was Bent, Curated project 214: 1,023 outputs built on an isometric grid, released on 29 November 2021 at 0.7 ETH ¹⁷. He has said he "stumbled on Bent by accident" and "strove for variety" ⁷.

Imposter Syndrome, released a year later, turns away from that variety. The statement sets the work against trends that "push toward the visually complex and highly technical" and says its palettes "echo those used in Bent" ¹. Later projects kept the minimal register. The index records two more ippsketch projects on Art Blocks Engine contracts: Impossible Distance (600 outputs, April 2023), made for PROOF's Moonbirds Diamond Exhibition, and Giving Shape (99 of 300 minted, May 2023), made for the Foundation for Art and Blockchain ¹⁸⁹. His own site also lists Echos and Sketch A-F on fxhash, Bound with C-VERSO, n=12 on Feral File, Paradigm with Tender and 1/1 works on Foundation ¹⁰. That page dates Imposter Syndrome to "Nov 2023"; the index and the mint transactions show November 2022 ¹⁰¹.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 2,770 bytes, SHA-256 5af30be193d2ad4b36af7dc6e635dca267a35c08e1d57455ea0cdc749a6511c7. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full; no code is reproduced here ¹. It is written in dense, golfed JavaScript. I re-implemented its random number generator and layout logic in Python and ran it on all 100 token hashes. The re-implementation reproduces every published trait of every token, including "Isolated" (my computation) ¹.

The program seeds a xorshift generator from the hash and then draws, in order ¹:

• a shape width, which is fixed for the rest of the run;
• a shape type (circle, rectangle or triangle, one third each);
• one of six colours, and one of three ways to assign cream, near-black and that colour to the ground, the second field and the top shape.

It then enters a loop. Each pass picks a pivot point, the angle of the dividing edge, the shape's height and rotation, and the size and direction of the shadow offset. Any layout that breaks a rule is thrown away and redrawn. A shape may not come within a 5 per cent margin of the frame. A polygon vertex may not sit within 2.5 per cent of the dividing edge, and a circle may not graze it. Shadows must separate by at least 5 per cent along every edge ¹.

The spread of counts is what 100 draws from even odds would produce; no value is weighted (code reading) ¹. The six colours are muted: a brick red, an ochre orange, a mustard yellow, a sage green, a slate blue and a dusty purple. They are always set against cream #dedbd3 and near-black #262626 ¹.

The work is animated and interactive. Over 100 frames the two shadows ease out from under the top shape ¹. As the statement notes, the number keys 1 to 4 show "the steps of construction" ¹. In the code, key 1 shows the split ground alone, 2 the top shape alone, 3 the two shadows without it, and 4 the whole work; each press replays the animation. The number-pad keys work too (code reading) ¹. The canvas fills any window at 3:4 and raises pixel density so that the longer side reaches about 2,048 pixels ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 100 token records through the Python re-implementation, turned up the following. Points that rest on the code alone are marked as code readings.

1. "Isolated" is not a switch. No line of the program decides isolation. It is a consequence of layout: when the whole group lands on one side of the edge, one shadow vanishes into the ground of its own colour and only two shapes remain. Eight outputs do this: #12, #18, #21, #45, #46, #49, #58 and #71 ¹. Isolated shapes are smaller on average, with a mean width of 0.24 of the frame against 0.39 for the rest (my computation). #49, #45 and #21 are the three smallest shapes in the edition.
2. Hidden squares and equilateral triangles. A quarter of the time, a rectangle's height is set equal to its width and a triangle's height to 1.1547 times its width, which makes it equilateral. No trait records this. Five of the 28 rectangles are exact squares (#2, #31, #33, #54, #96) and six of the 36 triangles are equilateral (#24, #37, #46, #55, #72, #94) (my computation) ¹.
3. Half the dividing edges are square to the frame. The edge angle is a multiple of 90 degrees, with a random tilt added only half the time. In the edition, 48 edges are exactly horizontal (31) or vertical (17); this is also unrecorded (my computation) ¹.
4. A width that never retries. The shape's width is drawn before the layout loop, so a large shape keeps being re-placed until it happens to fit. #47 needed 121 attempts; the median is 5 (my computation). The loop cannot fail, but a wide shape leaves little room, which helps explain why none of the eight isolated outputs is large.
5. A rectangle rule that rarely applies. One test rejects rectangles whose shadows are separated by about twice the shape's width or height. The shadows can be at most 0.3 of the frame apart, so the test can only fire for a side shorter than 0.175. No rectangle in the edition is that narrow, so the width half of the test never applied; only two final rectangles, #89 and #12, have a height that short (my computation). A test against the side itself, where shadow edges would line up, may have been intended (code reading; the intent is unconfirmed) ¹.
6. Circles are checked as octagons. Margin tests for circles use eight points on the rim, so a large circle can come slightly closer to the frame edge than the 5 per cent margin (code reading) ¹. Circles also receive a rotation that has no visible effect.
7. Loose ends. The script defines a helper for picking a random list item that it never calls, and declares variables it never uses. It builds its seed from 32 of the hash's 64 hex digits, skipping the first three. It also draws a height for circles that is never used, which shifts every later draw (code reading) ¹.
8. The shadow offset is not animated in full. Part of the offset, the shift across the dividing edge, is applied from the first frame. Only the spread between the shadows is eased in, so the group starts slightly off the pivot point (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No collector guide, set tracker or published grail list for Imposter Syndrome was found in the sources inspected. The families below are those the data and code define, and those that trade under rarity filters on marketplaces ¹.

Isolated (8 of 100). These are the sparest outputs: a small shape and a single shadow standing clear of the edge. They are the rarest published trait ¹.

Blue (11) and the rare pairings. Blue is the scarcest colour. Among colour and top-shape pairings, Purple with a white top (2), and Blue with black and Yellow with black (3 each), are the rarest ¹. The edition holds 47 of the 54 possible combinations of shape, colour and top-shape colour (my computation).

Scale. At the other extreme from the isolated works are the few outputs whose shape nearly fills the frame. #29, a blue triangle 0.77 of the frame wide, is the largest; #52, a yellow circle, comes next (my computation) ¹.

#5, the AB5D token. #5 is a Purple rectangle with a black top shape. Its shadow offset, 0.0504 of the frame, is the smallest of the 100, so the purple and cream slivers hug the black block more tightly than anywhere else in the series (my computation) ¹. Its history also traces the market. It was minted for 1.8642 ETH on 28 November 2022 and sold the next morning on OpenSea for 2.349 ETH ¹¹¹². It then sold for 1.21 WETH on 4 December 2022, for 0.027 WETH on 10 February 2025 and for 0.195 ETH on 22 September 2025, reaching the AB5D wallet 0xdd19…c045 minutes after that last sale ¹²¹.

Artist's proof. #0, a red triangle, was minted to the artist's address on 4 November 2022, before activation, and was still held there at retrieval ¹.

Notable collectors

No named collector or institution could be tied to the project from sources. At retrieval the 100 tokens were held by 66 addresses ¹. The largest holding, 13 tokens, is an unbroken run from #50 to #62. The transfer records show that its wallet minted #51 and received the other twelve on mint day from twelve different minting wallets (my computation from the index) ¹. No source names that wallet. Fifteen tokens have never left the wallet that minted them ¹.

The mint

The project was activated on 8 November 2022 ¹. Public sale ran on an exponential Dutch auction. It opened at 18:00:00 UTC on 28 November at 6 ETH, halving every 416 seconds towards a floor of 0.3 ETH that it would have reached at about 18:30:30 ¹. Nobody bought for almost twelve minutes. Then all 99 public tokens sold in three consecutive blocks, 16070197 to 16070199, between 18:11:59 and 18:12:23 ¹. On the minter's formula the price in those blocks was about 1.9075, 1.8642 and 1.8209 ETH (my computation). Etherscan confirms the last two exactly, through the purchases of #5 and #99 ¹¹¹³. Two tokens sold in the first block, 61 in the second and 36 in the third, for about 183 ETH in all (my computation) ¹. A weekly recap from Metaverse HQ gave the clearing price as 1.95 ETH. It reported floors "touching 2.8E" and settling near 2.3 ETH on "over 120E in volume" that week ¹⁴. The on-chain prices do not bear out the 1.95 figure. At retrieval the lowest listing was 0.4269 ETH ¹.

The charity split. Each purchase paid 10 per cent to Art Blocks and divided the rest between ippsketch.eth and a wallet Etherscan labels "Endaoment: Administrative Wallet" ¹¹¹³. For #5 that meant 1.2583 ETH to the artist and 0.4194 ETH to Endaoment. The donation is 25 per cent of the artist's share, or 22.5 per cent of the price, rather than 25 per cent of the whole sale (my computation) ¹¹. Across the 99 auction sales that comes to about 41 ETH (my computation, assuming every purchase split alike). Community First Village is run by Mobile Loaves & Fishes on a 51-acre site in Austin and houses more than 420 formerly homeless residents ¹⁵.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 without a link ¹. On that label the images may be shared non-commercially with attribution, but not adapted; commercial use needs the artist's permission. The program carries no separate code licence, and p5.js is loaded by the platform at view time ¹.

Significance and limitations

Imposter Syndrome is a small, deliberate turn in ippsketch's work, from the variety of Bent to a single visual device. The device is a shape whose shadow belongs to whichever world it stands in front of. The code is short enough to verify completely: every trait follows from a few rules, and the scarcest trait, Isolated, is a side effect of layout rather than a dice roll. The mint is a clear record of late-2022 demand: a Dutch auction that sat untouched for twelve minutes, then sold out in 24 seconds. The work's gift to Austin's Community First Village is traceable on-chain. What is missing is collector culture: no sources on grails, sets or notable owners were found.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Did the Endaoment wallet pass the roughly 41 ETH to Community First Village or Mobile Loaves & Fishes, and was the "25% of primary sales" wording meant to mean a quarter of the artist's share?
2. Who holds the run #50 to #62, and was it gathered by one collector buying from many minters, or by one buyer minting from many wallets?
3. Was the 10 February 2025 sale of #5 for 0.027 WETH a single-token sale, or part of a bundle or collection offer? Etherscan's summary alone does not settle it.
4. Has ippsketch discussed the series in an interview or talk, and did he ever mention the Isolated trait or the unrecorded squares and equilateral triangles? Posts on X were not searched. The Collector's Corner market note for 29 November 2022 could not be fetched.
5. Several quotations came from automated WebFetch extraction: those from ippsketch.com, Cortesi Gallery, Accompart's and Metaverse HQ, and the Spanish-language Giving Shape report cited in the bibliography. They should be checked against the pages.

Bibliography