Metropixeland

The work and its context

Metropixeland is a 450-edition generative art series by Fernando Jerez, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 331, in the factory category with heritage placement in the AB500 set.¹² Each output is an isometric pixel metropolis built on top of a colossal dark monolith: voxel towers, elevated rail lines with running trains, parks, billboards that display the edition number, and waterfalls of light cascading down the megastructure's flanks, under skies that range from bright day to aurora-lit night.¹³⁴

The description gives the work its motto and its thesis in one line: "A nice place to live if you are made of pixels." It continues: "As digital beings, we have been playing, working, making friends in a virtual world for many years. Metropixeland is a vibrant metropolis where our pixels can live in peace. Enjoy a relaxing experience with nostalgic vibes."¹ An ASCII-art skyline decorates the description, and the interaction notes document the full control surface: click and drag for camera control, keys 1, 2 and 3 for flat 2D projections, any other key to return to isometric, and 0 to swap between a transparent background and the default sky, "useful for screenshoting and editing".¹

The AB5D dossier describes Jerez as an architect who "builds worlds twice: once in concrete and steel through his architectural practice, and again in code on the blockchain", an award-winning practitioner and Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia, based between Madrid and Perth.² He has three works in the AB500 set: Stations (900 editions), Metropixeland (450 editions) and UMK (762 editions), with a collector-metric rank of 41 of 308.² The series runs on three.js 0.124.0 at a portrait aspect ratio of 0.75 with zero external assets, and it carries the CC BY 4.0 licence, the most permissive licence in this batch and the only one requiring attribution alone.¹³

Conception and development

The conception is nostalgia urbanism: the city as a metaphor for a childhood spent online. In his own project writeup, Jerez states the goal plainly: "The goal of this project was to make a representation of our digital experiences. Something that reminds the old times playing games or meeting friends online. A city or neighborhood could be a nice metaphor for this."⁵ The aesthetic followed from the feeling: "I wanted to made some sort of 'visual toy' that was funny, vibrant, classic, and connected with our digital memories. A retro-ish aesthetics would fit well with those feelings. The isometric perspective is a must for this kind of stuff. Sim City 2000, Transport Tycoon, Habbo Hotel."⁵

The writeup also records a deliberate modernism inside the retro frame: "No need to use big pixels", with modern voxel art cited as the counterweight inspiration, and a procedural-architecture ambition carried over from his longer practice.⁵ One technical sentence matters for how the work is classed: "And it's animated. Not a loop or gif. Animation is calculated in realtime."⁵ The live probe confirms the claim: frames captured fifteen seconds apart differ as trains and cars move through the city, with no looping media anywhere in the page.⁶

The edition-number billboards deserve note: the city signs its own outputs, so each metropolis wears its token number on a rooftop board.⁴ The writeup is dated 02/06/2023, after the release, and it cautions that its screenshots "are screenshots taken on different development stages. Final look may be slightly different"; it is treated here as a post-release development account, not a launch document.⁵ No project-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty.¹

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 metropixeland-by-fernando-jerez and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 331. The retrieved script is 25,062 bytes with SHA-256 digest e24527523266c9850cb8d65e9672824094b5422f76a33a0982c06b23fca1a17d, and it was read in full.¹³

This is a real-time three.js scene rendered through an orthographic camera, which is what produces the isometric look in genuine 3D.³ Deterministic randomness comes from an xorshift128 generator, a four-word Uint32Array state seeded directly from the chain hash, a different and leaner choice than the dual sfc32 pattern common elsewhere in the batch; Math.random appears once, outside the deterministic path.³ The city is built procedurally from the seed, towers, parks, rail lines, billboards, and populated with animated cars and trains; the animation runs through requestAnimationFrame in real time, as the artist states.³⁵

The interaction code matches the description exactly: a keypress listener maps "1", "2" and "3" to flat projections (rotation zeroed, yaw set to PI, three-quarters PI and half PI), any other key restores the default isometric rotation, and "0" toggles a transparent clear color and hides the background plane for screenshotting; mouse drag adjusts the camera within clamped angles and releasing the mouse eases the view back to default.¹³ The live renderer exercised every documented control on token 331000040: the reported hash matched the chain record exactly, frames differed over time (the city animating), a drag moved the camera and releasing it returned the view toward default, keys 1, 2 and 3 each snapped to a different 2D projection, and 0 toggled the sky off.⁶ No audio or video elements exist in the page.⁶

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows a same-day activation and a half-hour sale.¹⁷ Edition 0 was minted on July 1, 2022 at 08:28:17 UTC, about seven hours before the project was activated that same day at 15:22:30 UTC.¹⁷ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads July 22, 2022 at 16:00:00 UTC, and the official collection page carries "Released Jul 22, 2022, 4:00 PM UTC".¹⁸

The public sale ran about twenty-nine minutes: edition 1 minted at 16:17:58 UTC, the AB5D treasury's edition 40 at 16:26:05 UTC, edition 225 at 16:27:38 UTC, and the final edition 449 at 16:29:22 UTC.⁷ The minted count equals the maximum of 450, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.¹ The artist's own writeup records the outcome with a collector's-eye terseness: "Minted out!"⁵ The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.¹ The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 40, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.⁷⁹

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY 4.0" for Metropixeland, with the terms URL recorded in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY 4.0.¹ This is the permissive extreme of the batch: the CC BY 4.0 deed grants the freedoms to Share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to Adapt, remix, transform and build upon the material, for any purpose, even commercially, under the single condition of Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes. The deed forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.¹⁰ Every other series in this batch carries a NonCommercial condition (and some add NoDerivatives or ShareAlike); Metropixeland alone places no such limits on reuse.¹¹⁰

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.³ The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the three.js 0.124.0 library noted in the script type.¹³ Owning a Metropixeland 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.⁷

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.⁶⁴

Edition 40 (token 331000040, minted July 22, 2022 at 16:26:05 UTC, twenty-six minutes into the sale), the AB5D-held header, is a low-rise olive-khaki town wrapped in a pink elevated rail loop: park blocks of voxel trees, a small purple pyramid monument, a rooftop billboard signing "40" in cyan, and trains running the monolith's side rails under a blue sky brushed with aurora wisps.⁷⁹⁴ In the live view the trains kept their circuits, the camera swung under a drag and settled home on release, the 1, 2 and 3 keys flattened the city into three different architectural elevations, and 0 dropped the sky to transparency.⁶

Edition 0 (token 331000000, the pre-activation mint of July 1, 2022) is the greenest: tall emerald towers over a maze garden, pink neon billboards, a helipad, and blue light-falls streaming down the monolith against an orange-teal gradient sky.⁷⁴ Edition 1 (token 331000001, the first public mint) is the rust-brown city: terraced blocks around a cyan water plaza, a yellow billboard, teal falls on grey stone.⁷⁴

Edition 225 (token 331000225) is the daytime technopolis: grey-blue towers with antenna arrays, purple trains, a "225" billboard, and a tiny helicopter crossing the upper sky, the only aircraft in the sample.⁷⁴ Edition 449 (token 331000449, the final mint) is the night scene: a navy sky with green aurora, olive towers with lit windows, a gold pyramid and a purple train, the metropolis after dark.⁷⁴ Across the five, the monolith and the rail grammar are constant; the hour, the palette and the skyline's silhouette vary.⁴

Significance and limitations

Metropixeland is the batch's most generous object legally and its most game-literate object culturally: an architect's procedural city simulator, isometric by conviction, real-time by design, released under the batch's only attribution-only licence.¹³⁵¹⁰ Its twenty-nine-minute sellout and its CC BY terms together document a 2022 release built to be remixed.¹⁷

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the July 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.¹
• No project-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty.¹
• The artist's project writeup is dated 02/06/2023, after the release, and its images are development-stage screenshots by its own caution; the date format itself is ambiguous (February 6 or June 2).⁵
• The script derives its token index via min(449, tokenId mod 1000), a defensive clamp with no effect inside the edition; noted as a code quirk, not an issue.³
• The full range of sky states (day, gradient dusk, aurora night) is inferred from five static previews; no systematic sweep of the palette space was performed.⁴