Patterns of Life

The work and its context

Patterns of Life makes small coloured cells accumulate into a changing ornamental field. In the outputs examined here, cyan stripes, warm red bands and dark triangular regions form arrangements that can recall woven cloth. Reflection gives each picture a strong central organisation, while the evolving pattern repeatedly changes the balance between bright activity and dark space. A still can preserve one striking arrangement, but viewing the work over time reveals how provisional that arrangement is. ¹²

Vamoss released the 512-work series through Art Blocks Factory in July 2021. It is project 87 on its Ethereum contract. The collection page describes an investigation of colour through cellular automata and connects its patterns with older paintings and weaving machines. Those comparisons supply a useful point of entry without turning the work into an illustration of a particular textile tradition. ³⁴

The program uses binary neighbourhood rules and a fixed colour array. Its distinct outputs arise from hash-derived rules and initial values, followed by a particular way of recording, reading and reflecting the changing grid. The relation between local computation and the larger ornamental figure is the central subject of this essay. Four original renderers were inspected, including AB5D's #361; visible changes were observed in that holding and in #0. ⁴¹²

Conception and development

The artist's project statement locates the beginning in experimentation with colour and cellular automata. It does not describe a commission, a dated sequence of prototypes or the reason for every implementation choice. The available statement therefore supports an account of exploratory method, while leaving the detailed development chronology open. Its comparison with weaving is the artist's own; a specific historical influence would require additional evidence. ³

Vamoss's Art Blocks profile describes a daily experimental practice in which code is an artistic material. This broader account is consistent with the project's investigation of visual possibilities through a compact system, but it does not establish when the individual functions were written. A biography can help situate a practice without becoming a substitute for project-specific documentation. ⁵

In the deployed work, the combination of a limited colour set and changing binary rules makes experimentation visible. The same cyan and warm colours recur, while their areas and relationships change. The viewer is asked to recognise continuity across those changes, much as one can recognise a textile's vocabulary across different sections of a pattern. This is a reading of the observed outputs and inspected mechanism, rather than a claim that the artist intended a particular loom simulation. ⁴¹²

The indexed age labels group works under names including Civilization, Modern and Digital Patterns. Those words are not generated by the drawing program inspected here. Their presence is documented metadata, but the rationale for assigning them has not been recovered. They should not be used as proof of a historical progression or as a complete description of what a token looks like. ⁶

How the work was constructed

The complete indexed program is compact, at 2,739 UTF-8 bytes. Its hash-derived values are unusually direct: thirty-two hexadecimal byte pairs are converted to integers and reduced modulo ten. The first twenty-four resulting values, reduced again modulo two, form three eight-entry binary rule tables. A declared seed is not used by the drawing path. A helper that would randomise a rule exists, but the inspected program does not call it. ⁴

The automaton stores a ninety-by-ninety matrix and a corresponding colour matrix. For each position on the first axis, generation reads the previous neighbour, the position itself and the next neighbour at the current generation index. The two edge neighbours wrap around. The three binary values become an index from zero to seven, which selects the next binary state from the active table. This is an elementary neighbourhood rule, not a two-dimensional Game of Life update. ⁴

The same neighbourhood index selects a colour from eight fixed entries. These run from dark indigo and magenta through warm reds, orange and yellow to cyan. The colour lookup does not simply paint live cells one colour and dead cells another. A neighbourhood can receive a distinct colour even when the selected binary rule assigns it the same next state as another neighbourhood. Colour thus records distinctions that a black-and-white view of the binary result could conceal. ⁴

Initialisation deserves precision. Restart clears the matrices and places one live value at the middle of the first axis and zero on the second. Setup then fills the slice at first-axis index zero with repeated hash parity values. Calling that operation a conventional randomly seeded starting row would conceal the actual indexing. It is deterministic, and its arrangement within the matrix is part of the implemented work. ⁴

A further operation checks a slice indexed by the generation count plus two, while that index remains in range. If its binary values are uniformly zero or uniformly one, it replaces them with hash-derived parity and writes numeric zero or one into corresponding colour entries. This is a specific intervention in stored state. It should not be expanded into a guarantee that every output can never become visually sparse, or described as a complete restart of the automaton. ⁴

Generation writes colour by position and generation, while display reads a slice using the opposite ordering and paints a horizontal line of the offscreen graphic. The square dimensions keep these accesses within the same range, but the order matters. The result is not adequately explained as simply displaying each newly calculated generation underneath the preceding one. Whether the transposition was a deliberate choice has not been established; its behaviour is nevertheless part of the deployed program. ⁴

The ninety-by-ninety graphic is drawn four times, reflected horizontally, vertically and in both axes. These copies occupy a two-by-two arrangement. The reflections make a central diamond or paired triangles emerge from local features, giving small cell patterns a larger compositional structure. They establish horizontal and vertical reflection symmetry, without implying that every image is invariant under a quarter-turn. ⁴¹²

At the end of ninety generations, the counter returns to zero and the active rule advances through the three tables. The matrices and graphic buffer are retained. Cycling the rule table therefore does not prove that the full image repeats after exactly three passes: the stored state also contributes to what happens next. The program requests thirty frames per second, but no independently measured frame rate or complete visual repetition period is asserted here. ⁴

A mouse press calls the same rule-advance function. It changes the active rule without clearing the buffer or resetting the generation counter. The live holding was clicked during review and continued changing, but the screenshots do not isolate that change from autonomous progression; the specific control description comes from code inspection. No audio instructions or window-resize handler were found. Sound was not auditioned. ⁴¹

The mint

The indexed first mint occurred on 10 June 2021. Activation is recorded on 16 July, with the second mint and completion on 17 July. The collection page gives 17 July as the release date. These records describe different events: the earlier token is evidence that an output existed before the public release date, but its position alone does not establish a reserved or proof allocation. ³⁴⁷

The second indexed mint is timed at 14:01:45 and completion at 14:10:01, an interval of eight minutes and sixteen seconds. That calculation does not independently establish when public purchasing opened. Likewise, the gap after activation cannot prove that purchasing remained closed, because the absence of mints does not identify every condition of the sale. Full timestamps are retained in the source record. ⁴

Sampled invocations #10 and #20 carry the same 14:01:45 timestamp. This establishes a shared indexed timestamp for those records; it should not be inflated into a claim that twenty-one tokens, including the much earlier #0, were minted together. The AB5D holding, #361, is recorded at 14:04:46. The configured price is currently 0.1 ETH, while the original public price and transaction-level payments remain unverified. ⁴⁷

Copyright and licensing

The current artwork label in the Art Blocks index is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Although the index supplies no terms URL, the named Creative Commons licence has a published deed. It permits sharing and adaptation subject to attribution, a noncommercial restriction and ShareAlike conditions for adaptations. The deed is linked here as the terms corresponding to the reported label; a complete history of the project's earlier rights statements has not been reconstructed. ⁴⁸

No separate permission notice for the artist's program was found in the inspected script. The artwork label is not treated as automatic evidence of a distinct software licence. The declared p5.js 1.0.0 dependency has an upstream licence file identifying LGPL version 2.1; that library record is separate from the artist's code and the artwork. ⁴⁹

The original essay prose is dedicated to CC0. The displayed work retains its artist credit and reported artwork licence. Keeping these records separate allows readers to identify the relevant source without assuming that token ownership, public code access or the archive's prose dedication grants additional rights. ⁴⁸⁹

Close reading of examples

The comparison uses #0, #10, #20 and #361, with full token identifiers 87000000, 87000010, 87000020 and 87000361 on the project's Ethereum contract. Token records were checked against a fresh full-edition query. All four original renderers were inspected; #0 and #361 were observed at multiple moments. These observations describe particular states, not fixed appearances or a statistical sample of the whole edition. ⁷⁶¹²

In the first observed state of #0, cyan occupied a broad central diamond-like field. Dense cyan and dark vertical stripes spread around it, while warm small triangles appeared inside indigo wedges near the left and right centre. Thin warm horizontal lines divided the broad cyan region. The result balanced a relatively open centre against insistently repeated lines near the sides. Tiny black triangles at the top and bottom punctuated that arrangement. ²

A later state reorganised the same colour vocabulary. Cyan and dark vertical bands now filled the central figure, crossed by warm horizontal bands, while red diagonal runs extended through darker corner regions. The apparent openness of the earlier cyan area had become a dense mesh. What persisted was the reflected organisation and the contrast between cool light and warm small marks. The comparison shows why a single preview cannot settle the character of this output: texture and apparent weight can change substantially while the palette remains familiar. ²⁴

The central figure in #0 also changes the scale at which the eye reads the work. From a distance, its diagonals suggest one large enclosure. Closer attention finds repeated small vertical marks and narrow horizontal interruptions. The reflections make that local repetition contribute to a larger balance, so that the image can read alternately as a field of cells and as an ornament with a centre. That switch is a visual consequence of the four reflected copies, not evidence of a separate large-shape drawing routine. ²⁴

In the observed #10 state, fine warm coral and red horizontal bands spread across a broad central field. Indigo diamonds near the left and right edges were outlined by small yellow and cyan accents. Large black triangles at the top and bottom interrupted the warmth, with narrow horizontal stripes crossing parts of those regions. Compared with #0, the image gave horizontal rhythm more authority. Its dark shapes felt like openings within the coloured field rather than small punctuation marks. ²

The observed #20 state was much quieter in colour. Dark indigo and black dominated, forming two large side diamonds and triangular regions above and below. Small red-orange angular patterns gathered near four diagonal joins. Those scarce warm marks carried considerable weight precisely because so much of the surface remained dark. This is an observed sparse state, not proof that the token is permanently near collapse or that the intervention in the matrix always produces a particular amount of visual activity. ²⁴

AB5D's #361 first appeared as a dense lattice of warm marks with cyan vertical stripes, organised around large black triangles at the top and bottom. The small red, orange and yellow elements made portions of the field seem granular, while the black regions supplied a much larger geometry. The coexistence of those scales gave the picture both a broad symmetry and an unsettled surface. Its owner matched one of the full linked-wallet set retrieved for AB5D. ¹⁷¹⁰

Before any click, a later state of #361 had become a broad cyan field with warm textured triangular regions above and below. Two pairs of black horizontal strokes sat near the centre. The former abundance of warm detail had receded, and cyan had become the dominant spatial impression. The autonomous change was clear without requiring a measured frame rate: the balance of figure and ground had been revised within the same reflected structure. ¹

After a click, another observed state retained a cyan centre while broad dark bands with warm and indigo edges appeared above and below. The program provides a rule-changing mouse control, but this sequence does not independently establish which visible difference resulted from the click rather than continued progression. The distinction matters for documentation while leaving the viewing experience intact: the work continues to assemble new relationships across an already occupied field. Neither a fixed cycle length nor the submitted rule-index measurements were independently reproduced. ¹⁴

Significance and limitations

Patterns of Life gives a compact local rule a strong ornamental presence. Its fixed colour array does not make its images interchangeable. Neighbourhoods determine colour as well as binary state, and the changing distribution of those colours can move a composition from dense warm detail to a broad cyan field or a dark arrangement punctuated by small bright marks. Reflection then turns that changing material into an image with a recognisable centre and paired edges. ⁴¹²

The live comparisons are especially useful because they expose variation within one token as well as between tokens. In #0, a comparatively open central area became a mesh of vertical and horizontal marks. In #361, a dense field gave way to a much larger cyan presence. These changes are not merely decorative motion added to a finished picture. They alter its apparent weight, scale and distribution of attention. ¹²

The preservation problem follows from the construction. Retaining a token input and a still would preserve only part of the work. The matrix ordering, retained buffer, rule changes, p5 environment and achieved playback conditions all contribute to its appearance over time. A reproduction that corrects an unusual indexing choice or clears the state at every rule change would need to disclose that intervention. The implemented behaviour should first be understood before it is simplified. ⁴

Unresolved research questions:

• Recover dated development material and the rationale for the indexed age labels.
• Establish the original public price, allocations and sale-opening conditions.
• Trace historical artwork terms and any separate artist-code grant.
• Compare the indexed script with a pinned chain retrieval.
• Measure representative runtime progression and isolate the mouse control's effect across supported viewing environments. ⁴⁶