Patchwork Saguaros

The work and its context

Patchwork Saguaros is project 66 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 72 invocations against a maximum of 72, the runtime p5@1.0.0, a square aspect ratio, the Factory vertical and the licence CC BY-NC 4.0. Its price field reads 0.18 ETH ¹. The project description calls the series "Quilted landscapes in homage to the desert" and pledges 51% of mint proceeds to the Nancy Rockland-Miller Scholarship fund at the Kent State University Foundation ¹.

Every output shows the same scene: a single saguaro cactus, a moon, a sky and a strip of ground. The scene is cut into a square grid of patches, from 2 × 2 up to 100 × 100, and each patch is filled with its own lattice of coloured dots. The result reads like a quilt of printed fabric squares. The cactus is always recognisable, but its outline is made from the seams of the patchwork ¹².

Jake Rockland publishes as Purphat on Medium. His personal site describes him as a software engineer who was earlier chief technology officer of Art Blocks ³. He was interviewed as both the platform's CTO and one of its artists on the UpOnly podcast in November 2021 ⁴. Patchwork Saguaros was his second Art Blocks release, after Stipple Sunsets (project 51) ³⁵.

Conception and development

Rockland introduced the project on Medium on 11 May 2021, four days before the mint ². He grew up, he wrote, "admiring the quilt work of my bubbie (grandmother)", who wrote a book on Jewish needlework and quilting ². He spent most of his adolescence "in the Sonoran desert of Tucson, Arizona" ². Stipple Sunsets had been about beaches and a feeling of escape. The saguaro, by contrast, stood for "warmth and comfort of home" ².

The two projects share a method. Stipple Sunsets was built as a "digital-native silkscreen" from layered "screens" of dots, in memory of his grandparents' silkscreen prints ⁵. Rockland described Patchwork Saguaros as continuing that printmaking style "with additional inspiration from quilt-making" ². In an interview with artynft he said he developed "with p5js locally with my browser", and that he was "very much still learning as I develop my style" ⁶. The same interview previews "a series of 72 mints that depict desert landscapes" ⁶.

The design began on paper. Rockland drew a "coordinate blueprint" of the scene and used it as a reference while writing the script ². That drawing became the prize in a charity auction for mint #0, described below. The code matches the account: the cactus, arms and moon are defined as rectangles and circles at fixed fractions of a 1,000-unit square, as a hand-measured plan would suggest ¹.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 3,934 bytes, SHA-256 0263204a4276f1a04f8295fe9fdad13effa75fe917c2bc612fb86c18b1a726ef. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. I ported its random generator and decision logic to Python and reproduced the Quilting Size, Moon, Perspective and palette labels of all 72 tokens exactly (own computation) ¹.

The script seeds a small sfc32 generator from the token hash ¹. It then makes a set of decisions:

1. Six switches: two "forgotten" modes, a colour blend, a palette roulette, the mirror (Perspective) and the full moon.
2. The heights and lengths of the left and right arms, three settings each.
3. Two palettes, A and B, drawn from nine without replacement. Each palette has four colours, which are shuffled onto cactus, sky, ground and moon.
4. The quilting size, drawn from a list of 31 entries.

Then, for each patch, it redraws the dot size and spacing, and it may redraw the colours. Finally it walks every unit of the 1,000 × 1,000 grid and places a dot wherever both coordinates are a multiple of that patch's spacing ¹. The colour of a dot depends on what it falls inside: cactus first, then moon, then sky above a flat horizon at three-quarters height, then ground ¹.

Expected values are my computation from the program's weights; counts are from the index ¹. The nine palettes map to code positions as follows (own computation): Fallen Leaves, Preserves, Sunny Day, Forever Summer, Cool Autumn, Desert Sand, Blood Moon, Purple Heart and Lenny ¹. Rockland notes that three of them, Preserves, Fallen Leaves and Sunny Day, were shared with Stipple Sunsets. Lenny, he writes, came "in a fleeting bout of synesthesia while listening to Ghetto Lenny's Love Songs by SAINt JHN" ⁷.

The patch is the unit of texture. Each patch draws its own stitch size from five settings, which give dot diameters of 4, 6, 7, 9 or 10 units on spacings of 5, 7, 8, 10 or 11 (code reading) ¹. The dots nearly touch. In a single-palette work, therefore, the patches differ only in the grain of their dots, as the earlier AB5D essay observed: "different patches can have different dot diameters and spacing within the same picture" ⁸. In blended works, a third of patches, on average, take palette B. In Palette Roulette works every patch reshuffles a fresh palette ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

All points below were checked against the 72 published token records through the Python port. Code-only claims are marked.

1. "Forgotten Horizon" exists in code but was never minted. A 1-in-54 switch draws only the cactus and moon and leaves sky and ground blank. No token has it ¹. Rockland wrote that "we didn't get to see it at all in any of the minted pieces" and put the chance of that at 30% ⁷. My own figure for no occurrence in 72 draws is about 26% (own computation).
2. Forgotten Saguaro overrides Forgotten Horizon. If both switches fire, the saguaro is forgotten and the horizon is drawn normally, so the combination would look like a plain Forgotten Saguaro (code reading) ¹. The two tokens with the trait, #15 and #26, have only the saguaro switch on (own computation).
3. Hidden blends and roulettes. Seven tokens drew the blend switch, but #55, at quilting size 50, cannot show it and is labelled plain Purple Heart. Six drew the roulette switch, but only #10, #25 and #34 are small enough to use it. #23, #36 and #59 carry the switch invisibly ¹ (own computation). The published labels agree with what is drawn.
4. Uneven blends. A blend patch is chosen with a one-in-three chance per patch. The share of palette B therefore varies: 44 of 100 patches in #65, 27 of 100 in #5, and 3 of 16 in #7 (own computation) ¹.
5. A dead stitch setting. The second stitch parameter is drawn with a range of one, so it is always the same value. The call still consumes a random number on every patch (code reading) ¹.
6. An unused colour mixer and a flat slope. A function that mixes two colours by weight is defined but never called. The horizon function takes an x coordinate and ignores it, so the ground is always a flat band (code reading) ¹.
7. Holes at 100 × 100. At the largest quilting size each patch is ten units wide, but the dot spacing can be eleven. Because the dot lattice is aligned to the whole canvas rather than to each patch, some patches receive no dots. That produces the white-speckled, almost noisy surface of #12, the only token at this size ¹.
8. Half the hash is ignored. The generator is seeded from four eight-digit slices of the hash. The fourth slice starts one character late, skipping one hex digit, and the last 31 digits are never read. The script uses 32 of 64 hex digits (code reading) ¹.
9. A latent parsing bug. Random integers are made by passing a decimal number to parseInt. A value below one millionth would print in exponent form and parse wrongly. None of the 55,270 draws across the 72 tokens came close (own computation) ¹.
10. Size-dependent rendering. The canvas takes the smaller window dimension. Dot weights and positions are truncated to whole pixels, so below about 250 pixels the finest stitch rounds to zero weight (code reading) ¹. The work is static: the script stops after one frame and has no interaction.
11. Unlabelled cactus shapes. The four arm settings give 81 possible saguaro silhouettes. The 72 tokens show 47 of them, but no trait records the shape (own computation) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No published sales survey or market study of Patchwork Saguaros was found. Rarity here is read from the program and the index, and from what the artist chose to highlight in his retrospective ⁷. The floor recorded at retrieval was 1.99 ETH ¹.

The rarest palette combination. #65 is the only Forever Summer / Lenny blend, and one of six blends. Almost half its patches switch from warm greens to Lenny's neon pink and green on grey, so the cactus itself is split between the two palettes ¹. It is held by the artist's own address ¹.

Palette Roulette (3). #10, #25 and #34 redraw a whole palette for every patch. In #10 the cactus almost dissolves into 25 unrelated squares of colour, and the moon is split across patches ¹. The artist's address holds #25 ¹.

Forgotten Saguaro (2). In #15 and #26 the dots inside the cactus and moon are skipped. Each shows a white silhouette cut out of the patchwork. #26, a Blood Moon at 2 × 2 with a full moon, is the plainest statement of the idea ¹. Rockland paired the two in his retrospective ⁷.

Quilting 100 × 100 (1). #12 is the only token at the finest quilting. Its Cool Autumn teal and rust fields break into grain, and the cactus reads as cream on noise ¹. Rockland set it beside #44 in his retrospective ⁷.

Other small groups. Preserves is the scarcest single palette, with three tokens (#6, #13, #56). Four tokens have the broad 2 × 2 quilting, including #0 ¹. Collectors may also value #0 for its history and #4 for its physical print, both described below.

At retrieval the 72 tokens were held by 53 addresses. The largest holds seven; no source inspected names it ¹. The artist's address, as recorded in the index, holds four: #4, #25, #56 and #65 ¹. AB5D holds #22 ¹.

The blueprint, the scholarship and the Kent State print

Mint #0. Before the public sale, Rockland auctioned the right to mint #0 together with the "coordinate blueprint" drawing as a 1/1 on OpenSea, with bidding from 0.18 ETH and no reserve ². In his words, "The auction was won by an anonymous bidder for 1.25 ETH" ⁷. The index shows #0 minted at 00:45:11 UTC on 15 May, before public minting opened ¹.

The scholarship. The Nancy Rockland-Miller Scholarship supports Kent State dance students who show financial need and "empathy for others" ². Rockland pledged 51% of mint proceeds and all of the #0 auction ². He later reported, "I was able to donate $24,000 to the Nancy Rockland-Miller Scholarship fund". The gift was "matched by a $10,000 donation by my employer, resulting in a total of $34,000" ⁷. On the index price, 71 public mints at 0.18 ETH gross 12.78 ETH, 51% of which is 6.52 ETH. With the auction, that is about 7.77 ETH before any platform share (own computation) ¹⁷. The employer is not named.

The print. Rockland minted #4 for himself during the public sale. He "had the joy of getting printed to be displayed in the Kent State University dance department" ⁷. This is the only physical Patchwork Saguaro found. No print programme or printed/unprinted ledger exists for the series.

The mint

The index records activation at 00:02:58 UTC on 15 May 2021. #0 was minted at 00:45:11 and the first public mint, #1, at 05:01:04, the recorded start time ¹. Fifteen tokens were minted within ten minutes of the start, 29 within an hour and 53 within a day. The last, #71, was minted at 15:15:25 UTC on 17 May, 58 hours, 14 minutes and 21 seconds after the start (own computation, matching the earlier AB5D essay) ¹⁸. The price field is 0.18 ETH, the same figure as the auction's opening bid ¹².

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹. On that label, images may be shared and adapted for non-commercial purposes with attribution. Commercial use needs the artist's permission. The script carries no separate code licence. The earlier AB5D essay notes that p5.js, loaded by the platform, is licensed under LGPL 2.1 ⁸. No image beyond the Art Blocks renders is reproduced here.

Significance and limitations

Patchwork Saguaros is a small, personal Factory project by an engineer who also served as Art Blocks' CTO. It is closely documented by the artist himself, before and after the mint ²⁷. Its idea is simple and consistent: a fixed, hand-plotted scene, textured patch by patch, so that variation comes from quilting and colour rather than composition. Its charitable outcome is unusually well reported, and it produced one physical print in an institutional setting ⁷. The code shows a designed rarity, Forgotten Horizon, that the edition never realised, and switches that some tokens carry without showing.

Its limits are those of the record. There is no independent criticism, no sales history in any source that could be fetched, and no sign of exhibition beyond Kent State.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What are the notable secondary sales, with dates and prices? OpenSea, CryptoSlam, Coinranking and nftdig could not be read for this draft.
2. Is the #4 print still on display at Kent State, what size and medium is it, and was the employer that matched the gift Art Blocks or another company?
3. Who won the #0 auction, and is the "coordinate blueprint" 1/1 still traceable on OpenSea?
4. All quotations from the two Medium posts and the artynft interview came through automated WebFetch extraction and should be checked against the pages, as should the artist's 30% figure for Forgotten Horizon.
5. What does Rockland say about the series on the UpOnly podcast, and on X, where his posts could not be read?

Bibliography