# Neophyte MMXXII by Sterling Crispin

*Art Blocks Factory, project 279 · 168 outputs · minted 22 March 2022 · NFT License 2.0*

![Neophyte MMXXII #104: green and violet blooms on thick translucent stems against a yellow-green field](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/279000104.png)
*Neophyte MMXXII #104, the only Conical flower style and the only Vivid clarity in the edition. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## The work and its context

Neophyte MMXXII is project 279 on the Art Blocks contract `0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270`. The index records 168 invocations against a maximum of 168, the runtime `three@0.124.0`, a square aspect ratio, the Factory vertical and the licence label "NFT License 2.0" [^S01]. Crispin's mint text calls it "my ode to the computational beauty of nature", in which "generative plants grow from nothingness, bloom, fade away, and regrow anew" [^S01].

Each token is a live three-dimensional scene rather than a still image. Two or three simulated plants grow from the centre, flower, pulse, fade and are replaced by new growth, while a slowly drifting camera looks on [^S01]. The renderer never fully clears the screen. Each frame is laid over the last through a semi-transparent veil, so old growth lingers as ghosted smears behind the new (code reading) [^S01]. The static thumbnails catch one moment of that process. The artist's point, in the mint text, is that "long term observation is rewarded, as the longest cycles take several hours to complete" [^S01].

The mint text also frames the work as a retrospective: "the culmination of an artistic inquiry spanning ten years, five software development environments, and a dozen artworks" [^S01]. It is, in that sense, a late version of a system the artist had been developing since 2012, rather than a new idea written for the platform [^S02].

## Conception and development

Crispin's project page sets out the history. The system began in 2012 as *Plein Air 001*, written in C++ for the AlloSphere, described on the page as "a 30-foot diameter steel sphere", with "generative plant life" up to 30 feet tall [^S02]. Kathleen Flood's 2013 report on that piece described "virtual flora" that "grow and disappear", and noted that it "uses the Lindenmayer System to generate the 'DNA' of the virtual plants" [^S03]. The same grammar still drives the 2022 program.

The page then traces the software through several bodies of work [^S02]:

- *Psyche Techne* (2013), a holographic work.
- *A Particular Nowhere* (2014), for which the code was moved from C++ to JavaScript.
- A 2016 rebuild in C++ with openFrameworks, OpenVDB and the Bullet physics library, used to make 3D-printable plants for sculptures such as *Entropy Extropy*.
- The *Third Nature* ikebana vessels (2019 to 2020).

Some of these sculptures were shown in *Future Tense* at False Flag, New York, from 25 January to 11 May 2020 [^S04]. Jillian Steinhauer's *New York Times* notice of that show described "flower arrangements springing from vessels that look like machine parts" [^S05].

For the Art Blocks version, the project page gives the vocabulary that the traits later used. "Each generative plant starts with a five digit seed value representing it's DNA", which "is then mutated using one of nine rulesets". There are "three overall systems: the main floral plant generator, a shattered generator, and a bouquet generator" [^S02]. The code bears all of this out, as the next section shows.

## How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 18,218 bytes, SHA-256 `8c6a90cd9209b1914a6a39c04a24d00b42c18f5bfe98bbe55a1ff33a167200a9`. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. It is minified, and no code is reproduced here [^S01].

It seeds two small generators from the two halves of the token hash and runs each 500,000 times before use. It then draws forty numbers that set almost every parameter. For this essay those forty numbers were recomputed for all 168 hashes and compared with the published traits. The reconstruction reproduces every trait it was tested against, so the mapping below is measured, not guessed [^S01].

**The plants.** Each plant starts as a five-character string of digits from 1 to 6. This is the "five digit seed" of the artist's page. It is expanded by one of nine Lindenmayer rulesets, in which digits pick a rotation and square brackets open and close branches (code reading) [^S01][^S02]. The expanded string is walked like a turtle, laying down a tube of twenty-sided rings for each step. Flowers are placed at branch tips as rings of petals or spines. When a plant has grown out its full string, it fades. It is then rebuilt with a fresh string, drawn from the continuing random sequence, so each regrowth is a new variety of the same species (code reading) [^S01].

**Traits and their sources.** Most published traits come from a single one of the forty draws, split at fixed thresholds [^S01].

| Trait (counts of 168) | What it reads in the program |
| --- | --- |
| System: Mainline 136, Shattered 17, Chrome 14, Bouquet 1 | Bouquet below 3 per cent of draw 17; Shattered below 9 per cent of draw 20; Chrome from draw 14 |
| Plant Count: Trio 91, Twins 77 | draw 19, split at one half |
| Morphosis: Xenogenesis 59, Strict 58, Thick 51 | draw 27 in thirds: three formulas for stem thickness |
| View: Overview 61, Straight 55, Shifted 52 | draw 20 in thirds: camera height |
| Plant Spread: High 69, Low 66, Highest 24, Lowest 9 | the branching angle, from the forty-first draw |
| Color Code: 18 named palettes, Chrome 14, Unknown 10, two Blackouts | draw 10 picks one of 18 palettes; draw 26 decides whether a palette is used |
| Clarity: Dense 94 down to Vivid 1 | the opacity of the veil laid over each frame, mostly from draw 19 |
| Flower Style: Petal 149, Spine 18, Conical 1 | Spine above 90 per cent of draw 16; Conical a tenth of those |
| Flower Stance: Striking 162, Massive 6 | draw 1 below 3 per cent triples flower size and halves the growth budget |
| Oscillation Rhythm: Blazing 38 down to Long Now 3 | draw 18 |

When no curated palette is used ("Unknowable", 10 tokens), the background is a fully saturated hue picked from draw 9, and the plant colours are shifted from it (code reading) [^S01]. That is why these outputs, like the AB5D token below, have the most intense grounds in the edition.

## Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 168 published token records, turned up the following. Points that rest on the code alone are marked as code readings.

1. **Four traits from one number.** Guidance (Reason/Emotion), Flower Distribution (Exponential/Linear), Stem Length and Lighting all read draw 29 [^S01]. Guidance and Flower Distribution are the same coin under two names. Every Reason token is Exponential, every Emotion token is Linear, 84 each. Every Compact stem is Reason, and every Sweeping stem is Emotion. The two Flat-lit tokens, #73 and #151, are both Reason, Exponential and Compact [^S01].
2. **Clarity and plant count are linked.** Both read draw 19. The rarer clarity values (Structured, Defined, Balanced, Brilliant, Vivid, Magical, Mystic) sit at the top of that range, so all 32 of them are Trios. No Twin has any clarity other than Dense, Compliant, Rare Vision or Lucid Vision [^S01].
3. **The Massive six.** The one switch behind Flower Stance "Massive" also forces two plants and a point-cloud rendering and sets the veil opacity to its lowest level. All six Massive tokens (#30, #50, #70, #105, #106, #152) are therefore also Twins, Point Cloud, Similar and Lucid Vision. Lucid Vision occurs nowhere else [^S01].
4. **Structural exclusions.** Spines and the Divided arrangement read opposite ends of draw 16, so no Spine or Conical token is ever Divided. Shattered reads the bottom of draw 20, the same number as View, so all 17 Shattered tokens are Straight [^S01].
5. **A palette that can never appear.** The three colour tables for curated palettes each hold 19 entries, but the index that selects from them can only reach 18. The nineteenth palette, a dark olive scheme, is unreachable (code reading) [^S01]. The data agrees: there are exactly 18 named curated palettes. Sky, with two tokens, is rare by chance. Only two hashes fell into its slice of draw 10 [^S01].
6. **Dead grammar branches.** In one of the nine rulesets, rules made only of brackets are meant to be replaced by one of three fragments at random. The random test is called without its scale, returns "not a number", and always fails. Only the third fragment can ever be used (code reading) [^S01]. The helper that draws a random grammar character also ignores the argument it is always given (code reading) [^S01].
7. **Labels the program overrides.** "Established" stems are meant to be a fixed green. For the 122 Established tokens that also use a curated palette, however, the palette's own stem colour is applied afterwards and replaces it. The label survives, and it still changes the light intensity (code reading) [^S01]. Oscillation Clarity is published with a misspelt value, "Balaced", on 38 tokens [^S01]. The two Blackout tokens (#0 and #65) multiply every colour by zero, and the index omits both Color Shift and Flower Color Style for them [^S01].
8. **Headless rendering is treated differently.** The script checks for the "HeadlessChrome" browser signature. In a normal browser it fires 45 frames at once on load to fast-forward the opening; under a headless renderer it does not, and it also stops adjusting to window size after the first frames (code reading) [^S01]. Thumbnails may therefore show an earlier stage of growth than a live viewer first sees.
9. **Time is counted in frames.** Growth, fading and camera drift advance by fixed amounts per frame, not per second. On a 120 Hz display the cycles run about twice as fast as at 60 Hz. The sequence of regrowths is fixed by the hash, but the timing is not (code reading) [^S01].
10. **No sound and no controls.** The earlier AB5D essay said the work references the Tone audio library [^S06]. It does not. The only "tone" in the script is three.js tone mapping. The program listens only for page load and window resize: there are no key or mouse controls [^S01].

## The most coveted variants

No sale records, auction results or collector commentary specific to Neophyte MMXXII were found for this draft. Rarity below is therefore computed from the index [^S01].

**#104, Conical and Vivid.** The only Conical flower style and the only Vivid clarity fall on the same token, which also uses a non-curated, Unknowable colour scheme. Its thick stems and violet blooms against yellow-green are pictured at the top of this essay [^S01].

**#63, the only Bouquet.** The bouquet generator named on the artist's page appears once in 168 outputs [^S01][^S02]. Bouquet forces a point cloud, a darkened ground and an extremely wide camera angle. In the render it collapses into a single radiating flower head (code reading) [^S01].

![Neophyte MMXXII #63: a single pale pink radiating flower head on a dark grey ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/279000063.png)
*Neophyte MMXXII #63, the only output of the bouquet generator. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The Blackouts, #0 and #65.** Draw 3 falls above 98.5 per cent on these two tokens, and every plant colour is multiplied to black against a pale curated ground [^S01]. #0, Bone Blackout, was minted by the artist's address and is still held there. #65, Slate Blackout, has the Unknowable stem scheme, which occurs on only one other token (#50) [^S01].

![Neophyte MMXXII #65: a black silhouetted plant against a pale grey-green gradient](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/279000065.png)
*Neophyte MMXXII #65, Slate Blackout. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The Massive six.** #30, #50, #70, #105, #106 and #152 carry enlarged flowers drawn as point clouds [^S01]. In #30 the flowers swell into red bursts that fill the frame.

![Neophyte MMXXII #30: large red spiky flower bursts against a blue-to-coral gradient](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/279000030.png)
*Neophyte MMXXII #30, one of six Massive outputs. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Long Now (3).** #39, #47 and #68 have the slowest oscillation rhythm. #68 is also a Chrome [^S01]. Given the artist's emphasis on long observation, these may be the outputs that best reward it, though that is an inference, not a documented collector view.

**The AB5D token, #51.** AB5D holds Neophyte MMXXII #51 [^S01]. It is a Mainline, Twins output with the Unknowable colour scheme ("Unknown" colour code, 10 of 168), a Shifted view, Sweeping stems and flowers, and the fastest oscillation rhythm, Blazing [^S01]. Because no curated palette is used, the ground is a saturated turquoise. Against it, two green plants climb and loop, their flowers set as star-shaped rosettes along the stems.

![Neophyte MMXXII #51: two green plants with star-shaped rosettes climbing against a saturated turquoise ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/279000051.png)
*Neophyte MMXXII #51, held by AB5D. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

At retrieval the 168 tokens were held by 105 addresses. The largest holding was nine, and no source inspected ties the larger wallets to named collectors [^S01].

## Codex 3 - Neophyte

The mint text offered collectors "of the first 25 editions to be minted" a signed printed circuit board work "at no additional charge", giving its size as 19.5 by 12 inches (50 by 30 cm) [^S01]. The artist's page for *Codex 3 - Neophyte* (2022) lists the materials as aluminium and printed circuit board (FR-4 glass-reinforced epoxy laminate and copper). It gives the size as 19.5 by 13 inches (50 by 30 cm) [^S07].

![Codex 3 - Neophyte hanging on a white wall: a black circuit board with a white plant drawing, labelled Entropy and Extropy](https://www.sterlingcrispin.com/Codex3/Codex_Neophyte_1w.jpg)
*Codex 3 - Neophyte, 2022. Photo: Sterling Crispin.*

In the artist's photographs, a single branching Neophyte plant is drawn in white across a black board, over a faint pattern of circuit traces. The words "Entropy" and "Extropy" sit in opposite corners, with a small legend reading "Biosphere", "Technosphere" and "Noosphere" [^S07]. Entropy and Extropy echo the title of the 2016 sculpture series [^S02]. By index timestamps, invocations 1 to 25 were the first 25 public mints, all made between 19:00:59 and 19:18:01 UTC [^S01]. How many boards were claimed and made is not published.

## The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 10 March 2022 at 03:07:57 UTC by the artist's address, before the project's activation on 11 March [^S01]. The public sale opened on 22 March at 19:00 UTC as a Dutch auction. In the index's words the price was "lowering every 5 minutes from 0.9E > 0.72E > 0.54E > 0.36E > 0.18E > 0.08E" [^S01]. The last token was minted at 19:26:06, and the edition sold out in 26 minutes [^S01].

Grouping the mint timestamps into five-minute windows from 19:00 gives 13, 3, 8, 1, 20 and 122 mints (own computation) [^S01]. If the steps began on the hour, most of the edition, 122 of 168, sold at the 0.08 ETH floor price, which is also the index's recorded price [^S01]. That depends on the step boundaries lining up with block times and needs checking against transactions.

The project record states that "25% of the proceeds will be donated to Native Animal Rescue", a wildlife rehabilitation charity in Santa Cruz County [^S01]. No public confirmation of the donation was found.

## Copyright and licensing

The index records "NFT License 2.0" without a link [^S01]. The mint text adds that "collectors are free to make prints of their token, and commercialize them within limits" [^S01]. The licence, published by Dapper Labs in 2019, lets owners commercialise their NFT art "up to USD $100,000" and forbids modifying it [^S08]. The program has no separate code licence, and three.js is loaded by the platform at view time [^S01]. The Codex photograph above belongs to Sterling Crispin. It is linked, not re-hosted.

## Significance and limitations

Neophyte MMXXII is one of the few Art Blocks projects that rests on a decade-old botanical program. It carries the L-system plants of a 2012 AlloSphere installation into a browser, via sculpture, with growth, decay and regrowth as its subject [^S02][^S03]. Its code is also unusually legible once decoded. A small set of random draws controls most traits, which explains the edition's strict correlations, from the Massive six to the redundant Guidance and Flower Distribution traits [^S01]. Its limits for research are the lack of market and collector documentation, and the fact that every thumbnail shows a single, possibly headless-rendered moment of a work meant to be watched for hours [^S01].

Unresolved research questions:

1. How many Codex 3 boards were requested and made? Is the size 19.5 by 12 or 19.5 by 13 inches, and does the offer include invocation 0?
2. Was the 25 per cent donation to Native Animal Rescue made, and for how much? The artist's X account (@sterlingcrispin) is a lead but could not be read.
3. What prices were actually paid in each Dutch auction step, and what are the project's notable secondary sales?
4. How long are the longest cycles when measured at 60 Hz, and which traits produce them?
5. Does the PROOF "Artist Spotlight" video discuss Neophyte? It was identified but not watched.

## Bibliography

### Primary: the work and the artist

[^S01]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `projects_metadata` for project 279 (including the full program, description, sales notes and charitable giving details) and `tokens_metadata` for all 168 tokens. Retrieved 2026-09-20 via https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql. Collection page: https://www.artblocks.io/collection/neophyte-mmxxii-by-sterling-crispin
[^S02]: Sterling Crispin, "Neophyte MMXXII - 2022", project page with history of the Neophyte software. Read 20 September 2026. https://sterlingcrispin.com/neophyte_mmxxii.html (live version: https://sterlingcrispin.com/neophyte_mmxxii/neophyte_live.html)
[^S07]: Sterling Crispin, "Codex 3 - Neophyte", 2022. https://www.sterlingcrispin.com/codex3.html
[^S04]: Sterling Crispin, "Future Tense, False Flag, Jan 25 - May 11, 2020". https://www.sterlingcrispin.com/future_tense.html

### Video and audio

- "Artist Spotlight: Sterling Crispin", PROOF, YouTube (title and channel confirmed by oEmbed, 20 September 2026; not watched). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqzGQMKIG2A
- "Artificial Intelligence and Creative Expression with Sterling Crispin", David Elikwu, YouTube (title and channel confirmed by oEmbed; not watched). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5rhHO7RKkA
- *Plein Air 001 (Entropy, Terror, and the Sublime within a Cyberspace Landscape)*, Vimeo (title from search listing; oEmbed failed). https://vimeo.com/56454641
- Sterling Crispin, YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/c/sterlingcrispin

### Criticism, collecting and market

[^S03]: Kathleen Flood, "Sterling Crispin Weaves Virtual Algorithmic Landscapes", Vice (The Creators Project), 7 January 2013. https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ad7qy/sterling-crispin-weaves-virtual-algorithmic-landscapes
[^S05]: False Flag, "Sterling Crispin at FALSE FLAG in the New York Times", 23 April 2020, quoting Jillian Steinhauer, "2 Art Gallery Shows to Explore From Home", *The New York Times*. https://false-flag.org/news/sterlingcrispinnyt
[^S06]: AB5D, "Neophyte MMXXII by Sterling Crispin", earlier essay. Read 20 September 2026. https://ab5d.xyz/series/neophyte-mmxxii-by-sterling-crispin/
[^S08]: Dapper Labs, "NFT License 2.0: Why a NFT can do what Mickey Mouse never could", Medium, 22 January 2019. https://medium.com/dapperlabs/nft-license-2-0-why-a-nft-can-do-what-mickey-mouse-never-could-27673d5f29aa

### Further reading

- Dave Krugman, "Interview: Sterling Crispin", ALLSHIPS, 20 June 2021 (predates Neophyte MMXXII and does not discuss it). https://www.allships.co/article/interview-sterling-crispin
- ofluxo, "'Future Tense': Sterling Crispin at False Flag, New York". https://www.ofluxo.net/future-tense-sterling-crispin-at-false-flag-new-york/
- Native Animal Rescue, Santa Cruz County. https://nativeanimalrescue.org/
- Sterling Crispin, exhibitions list. http://www.sterlingcrispin.com/exhibitions.html