# Meridian by Matt DesLauriers

*Art Blocks Playground, project 163 · 1,000 outputs · minted 28 September 2021 · CC BY-NC 4.0*

![Meridian #801, "Starry Night": blue mountains under a night sky of black strokes](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/163000801.png)
*Meridian #801, known to collectors as "Starry Night". Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## The work and its context

Meridian is project 163 on the Art Blocks contract `0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270`. The index records 1,000 invocations against a maximum of 1,000, the runtime `js@na` (plain JavaScript with no library), an aspect ratio of 0.5625 (9:16, portrait), the licence label `CC BY-NC 4.0` and the Playground vertical [^S01]. The project description reads: "Stratified landforms constructed from many small strokes of colour." It adds that each hash "describes a coordinate within a multidimensional generative space" [^S01].

Seen from a distance, each output looks like a cross-section of folded rock, a mountain range or a stack of sediment. Close up, it dissolves into hundreds of thousands of short marks [^S02]. DesLauriers is a Canadian-born artist and creative coder based in London, and a prolific author of open-source tools for generative art [^S03][^S04]. Meridian followed his Art Blocks project Subscapes and, in his words, carries "some of the same threads of code" [^S02].

The series has an unusually full life off the screen. It was designed for print, it has a token-limited print programme and an open-edition one, and it became a book that reproduces all 1,000 outputs [^S02][^S03][^S05][^S06]. Two Meridians were sold at Phillips in 2022 [^S07][^S08].

## Conception and development

DesLauriers set out his aims in "Notes on Meridian", published before the release. He describes a 15 kB JavaScript program that "constructs stratified landforms using hundreds of thousands of small strokes of colour". He says it "builds upon ideas and techniques I've been developing for some years now" and that he iterated on it daily over about two months [^S02]. He also writes that the outputs are "best appreciated in larger formats, such as a 100cm tall print" [^S02].

Curated's 2024 survey links the imagery to Canadian summer landscapes and to the layered structure of sedimentary rock. It quotes DesLauriers: "I knew this was going to become a print project" [^S03]. The same survey reports that the program runs outside the browser, from the command line in Node.js, and can produce SVG and pen-plotter output [^S03]. The published script is consistent with that: when no web page is present, it hands back its renderer instead of drawing (code reading) [^S01].

He has talked about his wider practice in filmed talks and conversations, including one with Tyler Hobbs, and a short video of Meridian circulates on YouTube [^S09].

The notes also frame the title. A meridian is a line of longitude, and the project description speaks of each composition lying "along one of many possible longitudes" [^S01][^S02].

## How the work was constructed

The program is a single minified script of 15,295 bytes, SHA-256 `1b123c894fcaa578f941e66ef316d3196925364d6a64f37ebfd6337f2c5f8121`. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here [^S01].

It seeds a xorshift random generator from four 32-bit words of the token hash. It then builds an imaginary landscape: a height field made of several octaves of simplex noise, placed at a random offset within a range of plus or minus 1,000 units (code reading) [^S01]. An orthographic camera looks down on the terrain from a corner. For each point on the canvas, the program marches a ray until it strikes the ground [^S01]. The surface is lit with a diffuse formula whose constants match the Oren-Nayar model as written in the stackgl `glsl-diffuse-oren-nayar` module (code reading) [^S01].

Stroke positions come from a Poisson-disc sampler, so marks are evenly spaced without lying on a grid. They are sorted from far to near and drawn as short line segments, a batch per animation frame. The work therefore paints itself in over a few seconds [^S01]. The colour of each mark is set by the depth of the ray passed through a second noise field. This produces the bands, and a step function leaves a thin blank strip in many bands (code reading) [^S01].

I reproduced the program's set-up stage for all 1,000 hashes in Node.js and compared the results with the published traits. The six traits map exactly onto six program variables [^S01]:

- **Style** is a weighted pick of thirteen branches, plus a 2.5 per cent sub-branch of Paletted that becomes Prime.
- **Zoom** is the camera scale (Far 326, Medium 327, Close 347).
- **Frequency** multiplies the depth fed to the colour noise (Low 239, Gradual 213, Standard 491, High 57).
- **Structure: Variable** (192) sorts the colours by brightness and switches to longer, variably spaced strokes.
- **Chromaticity** is the number of distinct colours in use.
- **Palette** is the index of one of 21 named colour groups.

| Style | Program weight (per 1,000) | Published count |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Paletted | 405, less the Prime share (about 395) | 407 |
| Prismatic | 250 | 262 |
| Gouache | 100 | 99 |
| Procedural | 60 | 60 |
| Polarized | 30 | 32 |
| Gilded | 30 | 27 |
| Lino | 25 | 20 |
| Screenprint | 25 | 21 |
| Watercolour | 25 | 22 |
| Invert | 20 | 13 |
| Newsprint | 10 | 12 |
| Charcoal | 10 | 9 |
| Prime | about 10 (2.5% of Paletted) | 8 |
| Topographic | 10 | 8 |

The styles are distinct renderers, not just colour schemes. Lino draws black strokes on one of six ground colours. Screenprint draws white strokes on a palette colour. Invert draws white on black with additive blending. Procedural and Watercolour build their colours in the OKLCH colour space. Charcoal uses coarser dark grey marks that shorten and vanish on low ground. Topographic adds an eighth noise octave, uses yellow, black and white, and shortens its strokes in the light, so that the relief of the terrain shows through (code reading) [^S01].

## Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 1,000 token records, turned up the following. Where a point rests on the code alone, it is marked as a code reading.

1. **Prime is a bug kept on purpose.** DesLauriers told Curated that "a bug in my code reduced the palette to a single colour", and that he liked it enough to make it a style [^S03]. In the code Prime is not a style of its own. It is a 2.5 per cent switch inside Paletted that keeps a single palette colour, chosen from those that still contrast with the ground after multiply blending. That is why Prime is the only style besides Paletted that carries a named palette [^S01].
2. **"Sixty" colours that are really 55.** Prismatic takes the first 40, 50 or 60 colours from a shuffled list of the colours in each palette's first colour set. That list holds only 55 distinct colours, so the "60" option gives all 55. My re-run of the set-up for every hash gives Prismatics with 40 (91), 50 (86) and 55 (85) colours, and none with 60 [^S01].
3. **Named palettes cover only 415 tokens.** Prismatic and Gouache draw on the same palette colours as Paletted, but only Paletted and Prime record a palette name. The other 585 outputs are labelled "Other" [^S01].
4. **A hidden pair of terrain settings.** Every token also picks one of three pairs of values for the height exponent and amplitude of the landscape (346, 329 and 325 tokens). No trait records this choice, nor the terrain offset (my computation) [^S01].
5. **Locked combinations.** Charcoal and Topographic are always Far, and Gilded is always Close. Invert and Polarized are always Variable. The High frequency occurs only in Paletted. Every Invert, Newsprint, Polarized, Prime and Topographic is Standard frequency [^S01].
6. **Polarized has an empty colour.** Half the time the first of its three colours is left empty, and marks that land in that band are skipped, so the ground shows through. The data splits 21 Duochrome to 11 Trichrome [^S01].
7. **Newsprint is cut into panels.** Only Newsprint divides the canvas into rectangular panels, five to seven levels deep. Each panel gets its own stroke spacing (code reading) [^S01].
8. **Colour adjustment.** In six styles, including Paletted and Prismatic, every colour is passed through a levels adjustment before drawing, which deepens the darker tones (code reading) [^S01].
9. **Leftovers and settings.** The sampler contains terms multiplied by zero. The page also reads optional settings from the window for aspect, size, margin, density and levels. The default render is 2,048 pixels tall, and it scales up on larger screens (code reading) [^S01].
10. **An unexplained skew.** Lino's Variable structure should arise a third of the time, yet only one of the 20 Linos, #763, is Variable [^S01]. The program gives no reason for this, and chance remains possible.

## The most coveted variants

Curated calls Charcoal (9), Prime (8) and Topographic (8) the "explicit grails" [^S03]. It reports that the community voted Topographic its favourite style. DesLauriers said it "is one of the few styles where I really leaned into the underlying 3D terrain structures" [^S03].

![Meridian #660, a Topographic: black relief with yellow and white bands](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/163000660.png)
*Meridian #660, Topographic, one of eight. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Topographic (8).** The eight are #152, #230, #258, #327, #660, #759, #857 and #988, all Far and all Uniform [^S01]. Curated says #660 was "one of the first Meridians we ever collected" [^S03].

**Prime (8).** These are #103, #127, #171, #287, #317, #624, #684 and #903. Each has a different palette, and none is Close [^S01]. Curated features #127 and #171 [^S03].

![Meridian #127, a Prime in the Volcano palette](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/163000127.png)
*Meridian #127, Prime, Volcano palette. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Charcoal (9).** The nine are #70, #150, #172, #266, #379, #638, #738, #792 and #809, all Far [^S01]. Curated's survey includes #638 [^S03].

**Gilded (27).** Curated pairs Gilded with Topographic. #299 was "the first Meridian added to the Curated collection" and was shown in "Collecting the Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain" at Assembly Curated in Houston [^S03].

**Prismatic (262).** DesLauriers told Curated: "Prismatic is my favorite aspect of Meridian because of its chaotic nature" [^S03]. AB5D holds #319, a Far Prismatic with Low frequency, drawn with all 55 colours (my computation) [^S01].

![Meridian #319, a Prismatic held by AB5D](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/163000319.png)
*Meridian #319, Prismatic, in the AB5D collection. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Starry Night, #801.** Rarity is not the only measure. #801 is a Paletted Duochrome in the Cave palette, with no rare trait [^S01]. Curated describes stacked black layers forming "the night sky over blue mountains", and gaps between the strokes forming stars. It calls #801 DesLauriers' favourite: he had run the algorithm "tens of thousands of times" before the mint without seeing anything close to it [^S03].

**Auction results.** Phillips' "Ex-Machina: A History of Generative Art" online sale (13 to 20 July 2022) included two Meridians. Lot 26, #762, an Invert, sold for £22,680 against an estimate of £18,000 to £22,000. Lot 27, #640, a Prismatic, sold for £11,970 against £10,000 to £15,000 [^S07][^S08][^S01].

![Meridian #762, an Invert: white strokes on black](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/163000762.png)
*Meridian #762, Invert, sold at Phillips in July 2022. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## Notable collectors

- **Curated** holds #299 and #660 [^S03]. In the index both sit in the same wallet, which also holds #39, #112, #127 and #131, all tokens featured in Curated's survey. No source inspected names that wallet [^S01][^S03].
- **Arab Bank Switzerland's ABS Digital Art Collection** lists #626, a Close Paletted in the Fjord palette [^S10][^S01].
- **AB5D** holds #319 [^S01].

At retrieval the 1,000 tokens were held by 627 addresses. The largest single wallet held 18. The artist's address held none [^S01].

## Meridian in physical form

### Prints

DesLauriers runs a token-limited print programme. Owners who "prove wallet ownership" can buy a signed print of their own token, and if a token is sold, "the new owner of the token will then be eligible to purchase a print as well" [^S05]. Four sizes were listed: 28 × 50 cm ($130), 42 × 75 cm ($260), 56 × 100 cm ($400) and 84 × 150 cm ($600). Prints are "inkjet printed on archival quality 100% cotton paper" and signed in white, silver or black pigment pen, chosen to contrast with the work [^S05]. Unlike some programmes, the page publishes no ledger of printed tokens, so the number printed cannot be counted [^S05].

![A large Meridian print from the artist's print programme](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0031/6325/8993/files/150cm_2048x2048.jpg?v=1635180489)
*A 150 cm Meridian print, as shown on the print programme page. Photo: mattdesl.studio.*

A second programme sells unsigned open-edition prints of "out-of-band" Meridians, outputs that are not among the 1,000 tokens. They come in heights of 50 to 150 cm and are produced by Theprintspace in London [^S11]. In the notes DesLauriers says the aim is to make Meridian "more accessible to a wider range of people outside the scope of crypto art" [^S02]. Curated reports that he sees the value of the work as held in the token, with the print as the best way to enjoy it [^S03].

### Exhibitions

Curated lists showings at Assembly Curated, Art Blocks Marfa and MoCA Taipei, with a photograph of Meridians in a 2022 exhibition at MoCA Taipei [^S03].

![Meridian prints on the wall at MoCA Taipei in 2022](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/622078272651052c4fe1978c/66f49ecb24d75560b666c472_meridianprints2.png)
*Meridians in a 2022 exhibition at MoCA Taipei. Photo: Curated.*

### The book

The notes already sketched a community-curated book [^S02]. It was designed by monopo london, with Mason El Hage as art director, and published by Vetro Editions [^S12][^S13]. The first edition had 240 pages and four algorithmically generated covers, and buyers did not know which cover they would receive. Each copy came with a signed RISO print made with the Meridian code [^S13]. It launched at a pop-up at Stolenspace Gallery in London, where 100 copies were available [^S13]. The monopo page dates the project to 26 January 2023 [^S12]. El Hage called it "an artefact – a relic to be admired through touch and sight" [^S13][^S14].

A second edition followed in December 2023. It is a 272-page hardback, 214 × 301 mm, with a new cover and all 1,000 outputs, "essays, code, traits & large-format spreads" (ISBN 978-3-9821664-9-0, €55) [^S06]. DesLauriers told Curated that with a book "you can easily appreciate the full scale of the project" [^S03].

![The second edition of the Meridian book](https://vetroeditions.com/cdn/shop/files/MER-Meridian-Matt_DesLauriers05.webp)
*Meridian, second edition (2023). Photo: Vetro Editions.*

## The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 17 September 2021 at 22:44:08 UTC, eleven days before the public sale. The earlier AB5D essay gave that date as the launch, which was wrong [^S01]. The index records activation at 00:06:29 UTC on 28 September and a start time of 16:00 UTC that day. The first public mints came at 16:01:39, and the last of the 1,000 at 16:25:33 [^S01].

The sale was a Dutch auction. It began at 15 ETH and fell every five minutes through 18 tiers to a resting price of 0.25 ETH [^S01]. DesLauriers chose the format to "avoid a 'gas war'" and allow "natural price discovery" [^S02]. The mint times show demand arriving late. Eleven tokens were minted in the first 15 minutes and 36 between 16:15 and 16:20. Then 720 were minted between 16:20 and 16:25, and the last 232 in the 33 seconds after 16:25 (my computation) [^S01]. If the tiers began at 16:00, those windows match the 6 ETH and 5 ETH tiers, and the index's price field reads 5 ETH [^S01]. This mapping is an inference, not a published figure. The notes state that 25 per cent of primary proceeds went to the Processing Foundation, sent by the contract [^S02]. The index's charitable-giving field is empty [^S01].

## Copyright and licensing

The index records `CC BY-NC 4.0` without a link [^S01]. On that label, the images may be shared and adapted non-commercially with attribution. Commercial reproduction needs permission, and the artist's print programmes are the authorised route to a physical Meridian [^S01][^S05][^S11]. The program is self-contained JavaScript with no external library [^S01]. The print, exhibition and book photographs above belong to their credited owners. They are linked, not re-hosted.

## Significance and limitations

Meridian treats a long-form generative series as something between terrain rendering and printmaking. A small ray-marched landscape is translated into marks that read as ink, paint or charcoal [^S01][^S02]. It was planned for paper from the start, and its print programmes and book make it one of the better-documented physical extensions of an Art Blocks series [^S03][^S05][^S06]. This draft's main limits are the market record, which rests on two auction results, and the lack of a public print ledger.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Which wallet holds Curated's Meridians? The index places #299 and #660 in one wallet with four other tokens from Curated's survey, but no source names it.
2. How many copies of each book edition were printed? A post by DesLauriers on X, seen only as a search-result title, mentions 1,000 first-edition copies. The Stolenspace launch year also needs confirming.
3. Did the late mint rush fall in the 6 and 5 ETH tiers? The transaction values would settle it.
4. Why is only one Lino Variable? A re-run of the random stream for the 20 Linos would show whether this is chance.
5. How many token-limited prints have been sold, and will a ledger be published?

## Bibliography

### Primary

[^S01]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `projects_metadata` for project 163 (including the full program) and `tokens_metadata` for all 1,000 tokens. Retrieved 20 September 2026 via https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql. Collection page: https://www.artblocks.io/collection/meridian-by-matt-deslauriers
[^S02]: Matt DesLauriers, "Notes on 'Meridian'", Substack, September 2021. https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/notes-on-meridian
[^S05]: mattdesl.studio, "Meridian Prints (Signed, Token-Limited)". Read 20 September 2026. https://shop.mattdesl.com/pages/meridian-prints
[^S11]: mattdesl.studio, "Meridian Prints (Open Edition, Unsigned)". Read 20 September 2026. https://shop.mattdesl.com/pages/meridian-prints-open-edition-unsigned
[^S06]: Vetro Editions, "Meridian by Matt DesLauriers: Generative Art Book, Second Edition". https://vetroeditions.com/products/meridian
[^S12]: monopo london, "Meridian: Book Design". https://monopo.london/work/meridian-book/

### Video and audio

[^S09]: Video and audio (channel names as returned by YouTube's oEmbed service on 20 September 2026; the videos were identified but not watched for this draft):
    - "Meridian by Matt DesLauriers" (short), rarepint. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rkTSDBEw37c
    - "Generative Machines with Matt DesLauriers", fitc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uo6zFwSO78
    - "Inside Generative Art: Tyler Hobbs & Matt DesLauriers in Conversation", Unit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-11ECYkO0U
    - Generative Artistry podcast, "Matt DesLauriers" (does not appear to discuss Meridian). https://generativeartistry.com/episodes/matt-deslauriers/

### Criticism, collecting and market

[^S03]: Andrew Jiang and Todd Goldberg, "Collecting the Algorithm: Meridian", Curated, 30 September 2024. https://www.curated.xyz/editorial/collecting-meridian
[^S07]: Phillips, "Ex-Machina: A History of Generative Art", lot 26, Meridian #762, online, 13–20 July 2022. https://www.phillips.com/detail/matt-deslauriers/UK090322/26
[^S08]: Phillips, "Ex-Machina: A History of Generative Art", lot 27, Meridian #640, online, 13–20 July 2022. https://www.phillips.com/detail/matt-deslauriers/UK090322/27
[^S13]: Tom May, "Art Made of Code: monopo london on the design of Matt DesLauriers' debut book", Creative Boom, 9 March 2023. https://www.creativeboom.com/resources/monopo-london-designs-matt-deslauriers-debut-book/
[^S14]: monopo london, "The Meridian Book", Booooooom, 2 March 2023. https://www.booooooom.com/submissions/the-meridian-book/
[^S10]: Arab Bank Switzerland, ABS Digital Art Collection, "Matt DesLauriers", Meridian #626. https://www.arabbank.ch/about-us/art/collection/artist/matt-deslauriers/
[^S04]: Le Random, "Matt DesLauriers", artist profile. https://www.lerandom.art/artists/matt-deslauriers

### Further reading

- Right Click Save, "The Interview | Matt DesLauriers" (the article text could not be extracted for this draft). https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-matt-deslauriers-generative-art
- The Line, "Meridian with Matt DesLauriers". https://theline.wtf/meridians-with-matt-deslauriers/
- VERSE, Meridian series page. https://verse.works/artworks/9c9c692b-6fcd-4df3-8617-7fd40ced6d5c
- Matt DesLauriers, Meridian project site. https://meridian.mattdesl.com/