# Messengers by Alexis André

## The work and its context

Messengers is a 350-edition series by Alexis André, released through Art Blocks Playground in May 2021. It is project 68 on Ethereum contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270.[^S01][^S03] The artist introduces its formations with a brief science-fiction premise: "Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don't talk to us. Yet."[^S01] The title encourages the viewer to look for a message in an image whose program specifies paths, colours and accumulated marks, without supplying a codebook for their meaning.[^S02]

In a March 2021 interview, André traced his interest in generative art to beginning a computer-graphics doctorate in 2004, discovering Casey Reas's work and then Processing. He distinguished technical accomplishment from artistic purpose, and described his interest in systems that sustain coherent results across an entire collection.[^S04] This is useful context for Messengers, though the interview concerns his earlier project 720 Minutes. It does not document the development of this particular script. The [AB5D artist dossier](/artists/alexis-andre/) provides a wider account of his practice.[^S05]

Messengers concentrates its variation in a static field of marks. Its indexed script uses WebGL directly and contains its noise and random-number routines, with no external rendering library specified in the project record. The absence of a clock or interactive control directs attention to the formation itself: how its paths diverge, where colour gathers, and how a dense centre gives way to scattered marks.[^S01][^S02]

## Conception and development

The project's short description leaves the imagined structures unexplained. Calling them messengers gives their silence a particular force: a picture becomes something from which communication is expected. That reading is an interpretation of the title and description, rather than an artist statement about what any individual formation represents.[^S01]

The code offers another way into that ambiguity. It constructs a spine of control points, then guides many paths through fields derived from those points. A compact underlying arrangement can therefore produce a much more elaborate visible envelope. The result can suggest a signal or specimen without modelling either one as a physical object. The narrative and the drawing procedure meet in this gap between a legible presence and an uncertain explanation.[^S02]

André's earlier interview describes 720 Minutes as a system built around clocks and particular moments of the day. He also emphasises relationships between colour and parameters, and the collection as a meaningful whole.[^S04] Messengers invites comparison on those terms, but relocates it from changing time to differences between fixed outputs. That is an analytical comparison of the two projects, not evidence that the clock project directly generated this one.

No dated development posts, sketches or interviews specific to Messengers were recovered in this review. The indexed project has no interview or website link. Its description and deployed script provide the strongest inspected evidence for its conception; the earlier interview supplies context for André's practice.[^S01][^S02][^S04]

## How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug messengers-by-alexis-andre and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 68. The retrieved script is 10,619 bytes with SHA-256 digest 07de127b102c0b11f2167e1a2352fe3341d2ffcc31c0fecb42f793c5b5e4e0cc (recorded in evidence.json; the script itself is not redistributed). The indexed runtime is js@na, meaning JavaScript with no external runtime library specified, and there are no external asset dependencies.[^S01][^S02]

The script is a self-contained WebGL application. It seeds an Alea pseudo-random generator with the token hash, then draws the composition as hundreds of thousands of small discs, each constructed from sixty triangles and drawn by instancing through the ANGLE_instanced_arrays extension, blended into RGBA textures allocated with unsigned-byte storage.[^S02] The color system is a built-in table of twenty-seven palettes, each packed as 12-bit RGB values; the seed chooses one palette, and the script prints its index to the browser console. Kimi reported that the live renderer for AB5D-held token 68000086 printed index 12, the pastel teal-and-rose scheme visible in its output.[^S02][^S09]

The structure grows as a particle simulation. A spine of about one hundred control points is laid out, either as a noise-perturbed ring or as a randomized path, plus a smaller set of drift points. Two thousand particle streams are then seeded along the spine, and each particle is advected for two hundred steps by a flow field with displacement vectors divided by squared distance pulling it away from every control point, with simplex noise and optional swirl, angular quantization to eight or twelve directions, and per-stream color interpolation along the palette. A second pass starts two paths at each of two thousand sampled locations, yielding four thousand paths of two hundred steps. It varies opacity, colour and direction, and can add larger terminal marks. Six rounds of blur and redraw soften and reinforce this layer.[^S02] A collection of feature flags, using different thresholds on successive seeded draws, switches these behaviours on and off, which is why outputs range from tight geometric bursts to loose, smoky fans.[^S02]

The render is static: there is no animation loop, no interaction handler and no audio anywhere in the script.[^S02] Kimi reported checking the live renderer for token 68000086 in its browser, which produced the same pastel burst as the platform's static preview, a real WebGL canvas at 900 by 900 pixels, and no further change over time.[^S09] This review retrieves the current indexed script; its complete storage history and equality to a block-pinned chain copy have not been independently established.[^S01][^S02]

## The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 17, 2026, is as follows.[^S01][^S08] The first token, edition 0 (token ID 68000000), was minted on May 26, 2021 at 04:28:08 UTC, five days before the public opening. The project was activated on May 30, 2021 at 22:50:07 UTC, and the public opening followed on May 31, 2021 at 02:51:52 UTC: the registry's sale-start timestamp coincides exactly with the second token's mint, and the official collection page carries the line "Released May 31, 2021, 2:51 AM UTC".[^S01][^S03][^S08]

The edition completed on May 31, 2021 at 04:46:30 UTC, an interval of one hour, fifty-four minutes and thirty-eight seconds after the indexed start. Edition 0 already existed before this interval, and the records have not been classified into public, reserved or artist allocations; this is not an independently verified public sellout duration.[^S01] The minted count equals the maximum of 350, and the project is marked complete and locked.[^S01]

The currently indexed price is 0.08 ETH per token; no dated 2021 source inspected here states the original mint price, so that figure is reported as the present registry value and the launch price remains unverified, as flagged in the research notes.[^S01] No pauses, pricing changes or technical incidents were found in the inspected record; the project is not paused.[^S01] The index supplies chronology, not evidence of the wider demand or purchasing conditions for this release.[^S08]

## Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC 4.0" for Messengers, with no linked terms URL in the record.[^S01] That label corresponds to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence, whose published deed permits sharing and adaptation of the material for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit and a link to the licence, indication of changes, and forbids additional legal or technological restrictions on the permissions granted.[^S06] This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC 4.0, while noting that the operative terms as applied to the tokens rest on the registry label plus the generic CC text; no artist-hosted licence page specific to the series was located.[^S01][^S06]

Rights in the artist's script are separate and unknown: the retrieved script carries no licence header, and its visibility in the public registry is not a reuse grant.[^S02] The script declares no runtime library at all, but it includes random-number and noise routines inside the program. Absence of an external runtime dependency does not establish that every embedded routine has no third-party provenance.[^S01][^S02] Owning a Messengers token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.[^S08]

## Close reading of examples

The comparison uses editions 0, 1, 10, 20 and 86. The first four are early-edition examples; #86 is held by AB5D. All five official previews were independently inspected for this review. They establish particular visual possibilities, not the frequency of any palette or structural choice across the edition.[^S08][^S10]

In #0, pale grey and pink strands gather around a small, tangled centre against a grey ground. The upper-left spray is comparatively pale; darker pink and almost black streaks give the lower-right portion greater weight. Some inner lines remain sharply bent while the outer trails soften into the ground. This uneven distribution prevents the burst from becoming a symmetrical emblem. Its apparent movement comes from the direction and blur of fixed marks, not from animation.[^S10][^S02]

In #1, orange, cream and dark lines spread much farther through a peach-to-pale-blue field. Long curved runs open around a narrow central seam. Several dark hooks remain visible amid the softer colour, allowing the eye to follow individual routes before they disappear into the larger spray. Compared with #0, the warmer colours matter, but so does the broader sweep of the paths: this is a different arrangement, not simply a recolouring.[^S10]

In #10, teal and orange bands change direction abruptly. Vertical, horizontal and diagonal runs meet in repeated bends around the centre. The olive ground remains visible between these groups, giving the formation a more segmented appearance than #1. The script's optional direction quantisation offers a mechanism for this angular vocabulary; the preview alone does not establish which numerical setting produced it.[^S02][^S10]

Edition #20 also makes its changes of direction conspicuous. Orange and crimson bands bend around several small openings in a darker, rust-coloured field. Long diagonal groups pull toward the upper right and lower left, while vertical runs extend beyond the central assembly. The colour can suggest heat, but the structure deserves equal attention: the broad straight runs and sharp turns differ materially from #1's curved trails. A palette-only explanation would miss that difference.[^S10]

In the AB5D-held #86, cream, teal and rose marks form an irregular band across a mauve field. A dark notch rises from below the centre, separating two luminous concentrations. The right-hand group folds around an elongated opening, while thinner rays continue toward the edges. Its softer contrast changes the apparent atmosphere without eliminating the sharply defined bends near its core.[^S07][^S08][^S10]

Kimi's submitted research reports that #86's live WebGL renderer reproduced the preview and logged palette index 12. That is a submitted runtime observation, separate from the independent preview inspection here. The inspected script contains no animation loop, audio or interactive controls. Its many drawing operations assemble a static image; their computational sequence should not be mistaken for an ongoing performance.[^S02][^S09]

## Significance and limitations

Messengers gives a field of small marks the presence of a single formation. The inspected examples show how this unity can survive substantial differences in curvature, angularity and contrast. Around their centres, individual paths remain legible; toward their edges, blur makes those paths seem to dissolve. The pictures hold together through that movement between a sharply articulated structure and a less definite surrounding atmosphere.[^S02][^S10]

Its historical setting is early Art Blocks, but its particular interest lies in this relationship between construction and appearance. A static output can seem to radiate or expand because the marks preserve directional pressure. Comparing the five examples reveals this achievement more clearly than treating one favoured output as the whole project. The sample remains small and does not establish the distribution of effects across all 350 works.[^S01][^S10]

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

- The original mint price at the May 31, 2021 opening is not established by any dated 2021 source inspected here; only the current registry value of 0.08 ETH is recorded.[^S01]
- No artist statement, interview or development record specific to Messengers was located; the conception account rests on the project text, the script and the documented practice arc.[^S01]
- The twenty-seven embedded palettes are not named or attributed in the script; their origin (artist-designed or adapted) is unverified.[^S02]
- The individual feature flags have no public feature names; this essay describes their visible effects rather than asserting a canonical trait list.[^S02]

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [Messengers by Alexis André: project registry record (projects_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S02]: Alexis André. [Messengers full artist script (projects_metadata.script)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S03]: Art Blocks. [Messengers by Alexis André: official collection page](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/messengers-by-alexis-andre). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S04]: Jeff Davis / Alexis André. [In Conversation with Alexis André on 720 Minutes](https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-alexis-andre). Published 2021-03-04. Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S05]: AB5D. [Alexis André artist dossier](https://ab5d.xyz/artists/alexis-andre/). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S06]: Creative Commons. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International deed](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S07]: Art Blocks. [AB5D profile (linked wallet set)](https://www.artblocks.io/profile/ab5d). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S08]: Art Blocks. [Messengers token records (tokens_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S09]: Art Blocks. [Messengers live renderer, token 68000086](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/68000086). Accessed 2026-09-17.
[^S10]: Art Blocks. [Messengers static preview media, tokens 68000000/68000001/68000010/68000020/68000086](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/68000086.png). Accessed 2026-09-18.