Light Beams

The work and its context

Light Beams concentrates activity along a horizontal line, then lets colour escape from that line until it occupies almost the entire screen. Bright points seem to project cones into a surrounding haze. Darker intervals interrupt them, sometimes resembling obstructions and sometimes looking like lights of a different colour. Nothing settles into a single arrangement. Widths change, concentrations migrate and one chromatic relationship gives way to another while the central axis remains legible. The four live examples inspected here make duration essential to the work's identity.¹²³⁴

Jason Ting released the 150-work series through Art Blocks Factory in March 2021. The platform identifies it as animated and describes its colour movement through a comparison with waves. The title suggests an optical event, but the visible result can also resemble a horizon, a row of apertures or a seam joining two fields. These are readings of the images rather than documented subjects. The Jason Ting dossier supplies a broader account of his practice.⁵

The work's economy matters. There is little geometry to identify and no intricate contour to follow. Attention instead moves between a narrow zone of apparent definition and a much wider atmosphere whose edges are difficult to locate. A change at the centre alters the apparent temperature and depth of the entire field. Looking for a stable object becomes less useful than watching how neighbouring colours change one another.¹³⁴

Conception and development

In a May 2021 interview, Ting described an early interest in computer graphics and animation, a computing-arts education and a return to creative practice after working in engineering. He resumed sustained experimentation in late 2019 and began sharing daily sketches in early 2020. GLSL and TouchDesigner were part of that developing practice. This gives Light Beams a context in repeated experiments with procedural moving images rather than an origin confined to its token release.⁶

The interview concerns the forthcoming Bubble Blobby project, however. Its account of floating droplets cannot be transferred to Light Beams as evidence of this project's inspiration. No detailed development diary for Light Beams was recovered in the sources inspected for this essay. Its technical construction is accessible in the indexed script; the sequence of abandoned experiments, revisions and decisions leading to that script is not.⁶⁷

That distinction leaves room for close analysis without manufacturing a studio narrative. The deployed program binds a small number of token-dependent decisions to a continuously changing display. Comparing outputs shows the consequences of those decisions: some concentrate more interruptions along the central line, while others make the relationship between its upper and lower sides conspicuous. The system establishes a family of temporal experiences, not simply a palette applied to a fixed image.⁷¹²

How the work was constructed

The complete indexed program was inspected as text, alongside the canonical live renderers. It uses regl, a WebGL library, with version 2.1.0 named in the project record. The program requests half-float textures and linear filtering support. Those requirements matter because the apparent softness is constructed through calculations across multiple images held in graphics memory. It is not a photograph of a light source or a video file used as the work's underlying material.⁵⁷

The token hash is divided into thirty-two byte values. The first four supply the principal choices followed here: a single or dual arrangement, a compact option available to the single arrangement, a selection among nine colour palettes, and a numerical input to the shader. This description follows the assignments in the inspected code. It does not establish how often each combination occurs across the entire edition, nor imply that each token presents one unchanging visual state.⁷

Each palette contains five colours. The program closes the sequence by returning to its first colour, samples that sequence into a small texture and repeats it when looking up colour. Time advances the lookup coordinate. A further value associated with the local interval changes which part of the sequence is sampled, and the dual arrangement reverses that value on one side. Consequently, the field does not behave like one flat surface uniformly fading through five swatches.⁷

The initial drawing is much narrower than the finished glow. In the single arrangement, a thin horizontal strip lies around the centre. In the dual arrangement, two strips are separated by a small gap. A coordinate multiplier distinguishes the compact setting. A noise function displaces coordinates as time progresses, while interval calculations determine the identifiers used to select colour. One function contains variables that suggest a changing density, but its returned value is constant. Reading the calculation's actual result prevents an appealing but unsupported account of a density field oscillating over time.⁷

The glow is built through successive reductions and enlargements of the source image. Reduction combines neighbouring samples with weighted kernels. Enlargement combines nearby detail with a contribution from a coarser level. The calculation normalises colour by accumulated alpha where appropriate. Repeating these operations distributes the narrow source across a broad field while retaining traces of its concentrated centre. The apparent beams arise from this image-processing procedure rather than an inspected simulation of rays travelling through a physical medium.⁷

This also changes how the motion should be described. The relevant framebuffers are cleared before their drawing passes, and each frame is rebuilt for the current time. No inspected mechanism stores earlier frames as persistent trails. The softness can suggest accumulated light or a lingering afterimage, but that visual association is different from a program actually retaining a history of its previous pictures.⁷

Animation starts through the regl frame callback. The original Space control pauses it, then adjusts the time offset when resuming. In the inspected live edition #20, pressing Space stopped the changing arrangement; observations separated in time showed the same image. The script contains no audio component. Its initial internal rendering size is a bounded power of two based on the window dimensions, so display conditions remain part of reproducing the work. The inspection did not establish equivalent rendering across all graphics hardware.⁷⁴

The mint

The collection page dates the release to 22 March 2021. The index records an earlier first token on 20 March at 23:14:50, activation on 22 March at 02:11:27, and the second mint and scheduled start at 18:00:10 that day. Completion is recorded on 23 March at 03:01:18. These fields describe different events. The first token's date should not silently replace the public release date, and activation is not evidence that every potential buyer could mint at that moment.⁵

The observed index reports 150 invocations and a current maximum of 150. It also records a 0.5 ETH price setting. That setting has not been independently established here as the original public price or the amount paid for every token. The original announced cap, configuration changes and any distinction between artist, reserved and public mints remain historical research questions. Current metadata is useful evidence of the indexed state, but it cannot answer those questions by itself.⁵

For the same reason, subtracting the second mint time from completion would not prove an exact public sellout duration. The essay preserves the chronology without making that conversion. A complete reconstruction would require transaction-level classification and launch-era records, with the meaning of each timestamp kept explicit. The distinction is particularly useful for an edition with a first token preceding its advertised release.⁵¹²

Copyright and licensing

The project record's artwork label is CC BY-NC 4.0. The corresponding Creative Commons deed permits sharing and adaptation subject to attribution, indication of changes and the noncommercial restriction. The record inspected here does not supply a terms URL, so the deed is linked separately. This records the observed label; a history of any earlier artwork terms has not been reconstructed.⁵⁸

The current upstream regl repository carries an MIT licence notice. That establishes the notice found at that source, not a completed comparison with the exact 2.1.0 dependency used by this project. Exact-version verification remains open. No separate licence grant for Ting's artist script was located in the inspected material. Library rights, the artwork label and permission to reuse the artist's program are therefore recorded separately. The original essay prose carries AB5D's CC0 dedication.⁹⁷

Close reading of four outputs

The comparison uses editions 0, 1, 10 and 20, selected in advance as a small early-edition group. Their identifiers are 32000000, 32000001, 32000010 and 32000020 on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. Each canonical renderer was inspected directly. The observations concern encountered states and movement, not a claim that four works represent the distribution of the whole edition.¹²³⁴

In #0, a cool teal and cyan field surrounds a central row of pale lights and darker teal intervals. Their upper and lower extensions taper into softness. Small bright points can become more forceful concentrations, while darker areas open beside them. Successive states change the widths and positions of those relationships without abandoning the horizontal organisation. Its compactness makes the central line busy, yet the surrounding haze prevents that activity from becoming a hard-edged pattern.¹

In #1, peach and salmon dominate the broad field while yellow, blue-grey and violet gather near the middle. A comparatively sharp seam separates the upper and lower regions. The colours on either side are related without forming a simple reflection. This is useful beside #0: a small change in the source arrangement makes the middle read less like a continuous chain of points and more like an unstable join between two illuminated surfaces. The distinction is perceptual, supported by the inspected dual-strip branch.²⁷

In #10, subdued green-grey surrounds cream-yellow lights and lavender-grey darker areas. The lower contrast encourages a slower search for boundaries. In one observed state, a bright concentration near the left centre appears isolated by neighbouring shadows; later, a broader alternating sequence stretches across the frame. The changing spacing is as important as the colours. The pale atmosphere can seem nearly vacant until the centre supplies enough contrast to make that apparent emptiness active.³

In #20, salmon, orange and pink surround saturated magenta or violet areas and bright yellow light. Its greater chromatic force does not introduce a new compositional framework. The same central organisation now feels more insistent: a yellow interval expands into a luminous region while adjacent violet appears to push against it. Successive states change their widths and balance. Pausing the work fixes one convincing arrangement, but also demonstrates what a still image omits: the next relationship that the program would have produced.⁴

Significance and limitations

Light Beams makes a narrow source support a much larger perceptual event. Its distinction lies in the relationship between concentration and diffusion: the centre provides enough structure to orient the eye, while the surrounding colour makes that structure difficult to isolate. The four examples sustain comparison through spacing, chromatic contrast and the division of the field. Animation gives those relationships duration rather than merely decorating a finished composition.⁷¹²³⁴

The series also makes a preservation problem visible. A recorded frame can document one state, and a video can document one sequence, but neither fully specifies the procedure, token input, dependency and display conditions that produced it. Retaining those distinctions allows future viewers to judge a reproduction more carefully. It also keeps the account of the work anchored in what was inspected, without turning unresolved technical or historical questions into confident origin stories.⁷

Unresolved research questions:

• Recover project-specific development records and launch-era price and cap announcements.
• Separate artist, reserved and public transactions before calculating public-sale duration.
• Verify the exact dependency licence and locate any separate artist-code grant.
• Compare the indexed script with a pinned chain retrieval and test supported graphics environments.
• Extend live inspection beyond four early editions without treating a small sample as a rarity survey.