Obicera

A message with missing neighbours

Obicera #393, held by AB5D at the ownership check, contains a large circular field and a smaller one cut by its left edge. Teal, coral, cream and purple marks gather into concentric tracks; brilliant white connections cross the coloured fields. Its surface suggests both a diagram and something seen through an imperfect optical instrument. Small circles remain legible within the glow. The photograph-like softness is computed, while the apparent circuitry consists of repeated geometric marks. The original renderer was inspected directly, and its owner matched a wallet in the collector's freshly retrieved linked-account list.¹²

Alexis André released Obicera through Art Blocks Playground in August 2021. The current project record reports 529 minted works and a maximum of 529. That number matters to its construction: the program assigns each invocation a position in a square of 23 by 23 tiles. Each image consequently has two identities, a locally varied drawing and a window onto a larger shared structure. Its cut-off circles and lines leaving the frame can be read as evidence that the composition extends elsewhere.³⁴

The official description presents the work as a received message whose peacefulness remains uncertain. That premise gives visual ambiguity a narrative role. The eye can identify repetition, connection and emphasis without knowing what any symbol means. It is an unusually appropriate fiction for a generative edition: one can possess a particular output while lacking the context required to understand the whole.³

From a triptych to a map

In his August 12 guest essay for Art Blocks, André describes Obicera as the third part of a sequence following Void and Messengers. Collectors' interest in arranging related works helped prompt his thinking, and conversations with Aaron Penne included the possibility of triptychs. He began with connected images suggesting an unknown language, then expanded the connection into a map spanning the entire edition. The title reverses Arecibo: the fiction imagines a response to humanity's earlier transmission. He selected 529 partly for its 23-by-23 structure and partly because he trusted the algorithm at roughly five hundred outputs.⁵

The historical reference has a precise visual basis. The SETI Institute describes the 1974 Arecibo message as 1,679 bits arranged in 73 rows of 23 characters, containing pictorial information about humanity. Obicera does not reproduce that binary picture. Its shared factor of 23 provides a numerical connection, while the program supplies a different image system: circular concentrations, coloured traces and routes between centres.⁶⁴

This shift changes what a collector is asked to do. An attractive grouping of separate pictures can remain a matter of taste; a map asks whether a proposed arrangement is correct. Yet the individual tile still needs enough internal variation to reward looking before its place is discovered. The inspected code resolves that tension by generating a common geography first and varying the surface treatment afterwards. Coherence and difference are assigned to different stages of production.⁴

Shared geography, individual texture

The complete 12,129-byte artist script uses native WebGL and its instanced-drawing extension. The indexed dependency is js@na; this is not a p5.js sketch. The program creates its own geometry, shaders, colour interpolation and random generator. It requests an opaque canvas and renders into intermediate textures twice the canvas dimensions before the final copy. No externally loaded image supplies the underlying composition.⁴

Crucially, the first random seed is the constant 42. With it, the program builds 529 points on a slightly disturbed 23-by-23 grid, preserving the exact centre, then adds 200 more points. It connects these through a minimum-distance tree procedure: repeatedly selecting the nearest remaining point and updating the best available parent connection. This shared network is calculated before the token hash enters the local drawing process. Consequently, the edition's common structure is reproducible across tokens rather than assembled from unrelated random pictures.⁴

A shuffled list assigns the first 529 invocation numbers to grid positions. The token identifier, reduced modulo 1,000, selects an entry; row and column then determine the local coordinate transformation. Points near that tile are retained for drawing, including some outside its visible boundaries. A circle centred beyond the crop can therefore leave arcs within it. Reproducing a token requires both its identifier and its hash: replacing this mechanism with a hash-only seed would lose the assigned geographic location.⁴

Colour also participates in the larger arrangement. The script has 25 palette tables and interpolates between their entries. Outer grid positions use the monochrome table, while interior position groups determine the other palette indices, with another monochrome region at the centre. Thus colour is not simply selected independently for every hash. Position constrains one part of the image, while reseeding with tokenData.hash determines many local decisions about brightness, circular treatment and mark distribution.⁴

The foreground is made from circles or annular shapes, not continuously stroked curves. The program constructs reusable circular geometry, places many instances, and tests candidates against a spatial index of previously accepted marks. This collision checking creates interruptions and separations within the apparent tracks. A large loop makes 100,000 attempts at growing local sequences, shifting among nearby centres and adjusting the size and colour of marks. Proximity to the shared network's connecting segments influences their emphasis, producing luminous routes through the circular fields.⁴

The glow has an equally concrete origin. Soft background discs, layers around centres and repeated horizontal and vertical blur passes establish the luminous atmosphere. Foreground details are composited with further processing. Blur and crisp geometry coexist, so the picture can appear simultaneously granular and diffuse. These are finite rendering stages. The full script contains no animation-frame loop, timer, audio system or user interaction handler, and the inspected originals presented completed static compositions. Motion suggested by a spiral or the feature name “Time” should not be mistaken for animation.⁴

Release and the limits of the sale record

The official collection gives August 7, 2021 as the release date. The current index distinguishes an earlier first mint on August 5 at 07:37:54 UTC, activation on August 6 at 04:35:37, and the second mint and indexed start on August 7 at 23:00:09. Completion is recorded at 23:02:59 that evening. The latter interval is two minutes and fifty seconds; it should not erase the earlier token or be presented as the elapsed time since every possible meaning of “launch.” The inspected records do not establish why the first token was minted early.³

André's contemporary account says the project sold out in less than three minutes, consistent with that second-mint-to-completion interval.⁵ The current price field is 2 ETH. Separately, Tyler D. Warner's August 17 discussion of NFT markets reports Obicera minting out at 2 ETH. That dated secondary account corroborates a reported sale level; neither it nor today's field establishes every opening price, price reduction, reserve allocation or transaction's actual payment. Those details remain unresolved rather than being reconstructed from general Art Blocks auction conventions.³⁷

A September 9 Art Blocks newsletter lists $751,423 for bladelibrary.jp through Obicera. Its stated method mixes artist-reported donations, funds set aside and calculations from pledges, with approximations affected by currency values and other circumstances. The figure belongs in the release's charitable context, but it is not a reconciled record of recipient transfers. Reading the methodological qualification alongside the project row preserves what the source actually claims.⁸

Rights and the executable work

The freshly queried project record labels Obicera's artwork CC BY-NC 4.0. The corresponding Creative Commons terms permit noncommercial sharing and adaptation subject to conditions including attribution, a licence reference and indication of changes. The header uses the unaltered official preview with artist, token and licence attribution for noncommercial editorial display. The token's ownership and the artwork's copyright permission are separate facts.³⁹

The program's availability through the Art Blocks index enables technical inspection, but no separate artist-code licence was located in the inspected material. The embedded random generator is named Alea in the source; that name alone does not establish the origin or licence of this particular implementation. Native WebGL and its browser extension identify runtime requirements, not permission to redistribute André's code. The package records the program's digest and analysis without including the raw script.⁴

Preservation also depends on the display environment. The program sizes a square from the smaller window dimension and does not register a resize handler. Graphics support and numerical behaviour can affect rendering, even where the intended geometric decisions are seeded. This research inspected the current original browser outputs, but did not test identical pixels across devices, unsupported graphics environments or historical renderer versions.⁴

Four tiles, four ways of reading

The four comparison works are editions 0, 1, 10 and 20, verified against their token records and viewed in their original renderers. They form a deliberately small early sample rather than a survey of palette frequency or a reconstruction of the whole map. Their indexed features are retained separately from the observations, since a label can guide attention without replacing what is visible.^10111213

In #0, a bright circular concentration sits below the middle of a black-and-grey field. Concentric arcs expand beyond the top and side boundaries. Tiny hollow rings can be distinguished along several tracks, and pale radial segments cut across their curvature. Dark marks interrupt the light, making the centre feel less like a solid orb than an accumulation of transparent signs. The indexed “Donuts” fill agrees with the conspicuous annular marks, while the monochrome palette exposes differences of luminosity and density.¹⁰

In #1, pink arcs occupy much of the upper region and turquoise and pale yellow-green dominate below and to the right. A bright junction lies slightly right of centre, with white connections extending leftward, upward-right and downward. The circular tracks remain visible, but colour gives the broad field an atmospheric softness absent from #0. Darker interruptions prevent the pastel surface from becoming an uninterrupted wash. Its indexed “Miami” palette names this combination; the observation concerns the actual relationship of pink, green and light in this particular output.¹¹

Edition #10 is warmer and more crowded around its middle-right. Orange-brown and cream tracks surround two closely placed concentrations, while deep blue marks cut through them. A bright diagonal route enters from above-left and a pale connection continues downward. The paired centres compress the structure: instead of one circular field organizing the whole image, neighbouring systems visibly press into one another. The token index reports two centres and the “Smart Fox” palette, supporting the distinction without explaining away the visual complexity.¹²

Edition #20 returns to monochrome, but its strong bright concentration sits toward the lower right rather than low in the middle. Large arcs enter from above, and white and black tracks cover the surrounding grey field. A dark circular band around the principal concentration makes its interior glow particularly forceful. The crop leaves a great deal outside the frame; the image feels like a close view of an extensive structure. Comparing it with #0 shows how shared monochrome treatment can support markedly different emphases and placements.¹³

An edition that exceeds each token

Obicera makes the relationship between an edition and an individual output part of its formal construction. The map can be shared without making every surface identical, because the program separates common points and connections from local seeded mark-making. Its luminous routes invite the viewer to follow them out of the frame. A single token is complete as a drawing while remaining incomplete as geographic information.⁴

The artist recounts a team manually assembling all 529 images after release and a competing attempt to reverse-engineer the arrangement. This supplies a documented instance of the collection being treated as a collective puzzle, rather than merely a proposed reading.⁵ The code and inspected tiles make that possibility intelligible, although the present research has not independently assembled the full map. The strongest claim is therefore specific: Obicera binds serial variation to a shared spatial system, and its historical reception includes people working to recover that system.

Unresolved research questions:

• What were the complete original price schedule, reserves and purpose of the August 5 first mint?
• Which transfers substantiate the newsletter's charitable total, and how was its dollar conversion calculated?
• Is there a separate artist-code licence or provenance statement for the embedded random generator?
• How consistently do historical and current graphics environments reproduce the blur and compositing?
• What would an independently checked assembly of all 529 current originals reveal about seams and the complete map?