Maps of Nothing

The work and its context

Maps of Nothing is Art Blocks project 316 on the contract at 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, credited to Steve Pikelny. The index records 625 invocations against a maximum of 625, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 1, display_static true, the Factory category, the licence CC BY-NC 4.0 linked to the Creative Commons deed, and an artist website at cryptogateway.0ms.co ¹. The collection page calls it "An Art Blocks 500 release, in the Factory category". It shows a fixed edition of 625 and twelve attributes, and it carries a display note, "Do not add extra margin if printed.", and a charitable pledge: "25% of proceeds will be donated to medical aid for Ukraine via the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council" ².

Each output is a still image of an imaginary street map, printed, apparently, on a square sheet. Avenues branch into side streets and blocks. Coloured bands and blotches may be contours, flood zones or stains. A dotted border frames the sheet, and the surface is hatched with short strokes that imitate paper and ink ¹³. The mint description is written as a legal disclaimer. The maps come "with no guarantee of accuracy or completeness", "Any resemblance to real locations is purely coincidental", all textures and marks of damage "are mere simulations of an analog printing process", and "The maps are not intended to provide any utility to the buyer" ¹. The disclaimer is the artist statement: it insists that these maps depict nothing and do nothing, while the images do everything a map does to invite reading.

Conception and development

The main source for the artist's intentions is an interview published on his website on 11 June 2022, two days before the sale ⁴. Pikelny describes maps as detailed patterns without an obvious order that nonetheless carry an underlying logic, layering physical geography with human settlement. He pairs the project with his earlier Fake Internet Money: where money turns abstract value into a concrete object, a map abstracts physical space. The title Maps of Nothing mirrors the earlier title on purpose ⁴.

He is explicit that the work fakes its material as well as its subject: "these are simulations of paper maps -- each piece is faking the abstraction as well as the material" ⁴. He is interested in the "interplay between what reads as part of the 'platonic' map being represented, and what reads as an artifact of the printing process". Shadows sometimes seem "cast by mountains" and sometimes "by paper crumples" ⁴. He also names a link with Fake Internet Money in "the inclusion of obvious misprints", including maps "drastically printed off center" or "printed with low ink" ⁴. These text quotations were taken from the interview page by an automated text extraction and should be checked against the page before publication; see the research notes.

The program bears these statements out. It contains a rare off-centre printing mode, described under construction below. When the program loads it prints a single console message, "What are you looking for?", a joke aimed at anyone who opens the developer tools in search of meaning ¹.

How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 16,636 bytes, SHA-256 758a2fb82034364f278f70a24ecd62be7a5c663032ceefda502e6d3d531d33ae ¹. The renderer serves an inline script with the same digest and loads p5.js from a public CDN ³. It was read in full; no code is reproduced here.

Randomness comes from a three-shift generator seeded from a single eight-character slice of the hash. Each draw is reduced to three decimal places, so every random choice has 1,000 possible values ¹. The first three draws seed p5's Perlin noise, and the fourth sets the zoom, a scale between 0.2 and 1.2 ¹. The canvas is a square as wide as the smaller window dimension, and every drawing coordinate is scaled to it, so the composition is the same at any size ¹³.

The map is built in four passes. First, a noise field serves as elevation, and the program divides it into between one and fifty bands. Each band gets a colour scheme from seven families (paper, faded, burnt, bright, white-and-black, black-and-white and neon), with each band's neighbour chosen from tables of compatible schemes ¹. Second, the whole sheet is covered with short hatched strokes in each band's background colour. A shadow term compares the elevation with that of a slightly offset point, so the edges of bands darken as if raised or creased ¹. Third, the road network grows. A primary avenue enters from a random edge and drifts with the noise field. Secondary, tertiary and fourth-order roads branch from it at right angles and stop when they meet an earlier road, and short streets fill the blocks between ¹. Roads are drawn as chains of small dots of varying size, not as lines, which gives the printed look ¹. Fourth, a dotted border is drawn inside a margin ¹. The program draws once and stops. Its only input is the S key, which saves a PNG of the canvas named with the token's hash ¹³.

The printing faults are programmed. In about 1.5 per cent of cases the whole map is shifted by a large random offset and rotated slightly, so that the sheet appears misregistered, with the border running off the canvas ¹. There are twelve such tokens, and no published trait identifies them ⁵. Other rare switches drop marks at random as if the ink ran low, draw small star symbols at some road ends, or offset the background strokes as if the print head had slipped ¹.

A reimplementation of the parameter sequence reproduces all twelve published traits on all 625 tokens ⁵. Most traits name a single switch. Zoom groups the scale into Far (below 0.4), Near and Close (above 1). Base names the first band's colour family, with black-and-white, burnt and neon all counted as Dark. Paths distinguishes curly and straight road drift. Grain is "Course" or "Fine", the published spelling, according to whether the background strokes carry hue jitter ⁵. Theme is the only composite trait. A is any single-band map and G any thirty-band map, whatever the mode, and B to F otherwise follow the program's five colour modes, with two modes sharing the label D ⁵.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 24 May 2022 at 00:58:49 UTC, before the index's activation on 26 May at 01:13:55 UTC ⁵¹. The interview announced that "Minting will unpause for Maps of Nothing on artblock.io, 6/13/2022 @ 12:00 EDT", which is 16:00 UTC, the index start ⁴¹. The collection page shows 14 June in a browser ten hours ahead of UTC ².

The first public mint came at 16:00:20 UTC. By ten minutes after the start, 81 tokens existed, and by the first hour 238 ⁵. The edition sold out at 22:26:21 UTC on 13 June, six hours and 26 minutes after the start, which is also the recorded completion ⁵¹. The index's current price field reads 0, and neither the collection page nor the interview gives a price, so the mint price is not documented in the sources inspected ¹²⁴. The collection page's pledge of a quarter of proceeds to medical aid for Ukraine is recorded there; no evidence of payment was examined ². At retrieval the 625 tokens were held by 323 addresses ⁵.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed, and the mint description itself ends: "All maps are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License" ¹. The two statements agree. The deed permits copying, redistribution and adaptation with attribution, and prohibits commercial use ⁶. Holders and others may share and remix the maps non-commercially with credit; the licence grants no commercial right. The display note against extra margins in prints concerns presentation, not permission ².

The program carries no separate licence statement for the code ¹. It embeds no third-party code; p5.js is loaded by the platform at view time ¹³.

Close reading of examples

Four tokens were rendered side by side in the official renderer on the generator's own origin, with the browser pane displayed. Each was rendered twice, and the holding a third time at a smaller size ⁷³. They cover the AB5D holding, the two extreme Themes (A, single band, and G, thirty bands), the fifty-band mode, and one of the off-centre misprints.

Maps of Nothing #588 (token 316000588, held by an address in the AB5D linked-wallet set ⁸) is Theme B, Base Bright, with Heavy strokes, Coarse grain and a Near zoom of 0.519 ⁷³. It has three bands, bright, neon and bright ³. On screen it is a lime-green sheet densely hatched with black streets in long parallel blocks. Two black, meandering bands cross it like rivers, and a heavy black blot sits at the left edge, all inside a thin black border ³. It finished drawing in about 1.2 seconds and did not change afterwards. A reload produced the identical canvas signature, 9933da04 ³. Re-rendered in a 220-pixel frame, it produced the same composition, with an identical mean colour, at the smaller size ³. The image is fixed by the hash and independent of the screen.

Maps of Nothing #46 (token 316000046) is Theme A: one burnt band, a Far zoom of 0.365, and dashed roads ⁷³. The live values show it is also one of the twelve misprints. The map is shifted by about (−225, 253) units and rotated by 0.09 radians ³⁵. On screen a dark brown sheet carries fine tan street lines. The lime-green border is visibly tilted and pushed down and to the right, so its lower and right sides run off the canvas: a map "drastically printed off center" ³⁴. It rendered in about 2.3 seconds and reloaded to the identical signature 31643587 ³.

Maps of Nothing #10 (token 316000010) is Theme G, thirty bands alternating neon and black-and-white, with Choppy paths ⁷³. It reads as a dark brown sheet broken by black contour blobs, with pink, orange and white street fragments that stop and start at the band edges ³.

Maps of Nothing #152 (token 316000152) is Theme F, the fifty-band mode, alternating paper and bright ⁷³. The bands have become marbling: pale blue and pink swirls like end-papers. Black streets end in small dotted terminals, and faint green rings mark road ends ³.

None of the four made sound or animated ³. The save key was not pressed, because it downloads a file.

Significance and limitations

Maps of Nothing builds convincing maps from a noise field, a branching road grower and a paper simulation, and frames them with a disclaimer that denies they show anything ¹. Its interest lies in that tension, which the artist described before release, and in how much of the "printing" is programmed: misregistration, low ink and hatch grain are all written into the code ⁴¹. All twelve traits reproduce. The rare off-centre misprint that the artist singled out carries no trait, so collectors cannot find it by filtering ⁵.

The sources do not give the mint price, and the Ukraine pledge was not traced to a payment.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What was the mint price? The index field reads 0 and neither the page nor the interview states it.
2. Was the 25 per cent pledge to the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council paid, and how much?
3. Was invocation 0, minted in May 2022, an artist mint?
4. Should the twelve off-centre misprints be documented for collectors, given that no trait identifies them?