# Photon's Dream by Harvey Rayner | patterndotco

## The work and its context

Photon's Dream is Art Blocks project 313 on the contract at `0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270`, credited to Harvey Rayner | patterndotco. The index records 404 invocations against a maximum of 404, the runtime `js@na` (plain JavaScript with no library), an aspect ratio of 0.8, `display_static` true, the Factory category and the licence `CC BY-NC-SA 4.0` with a link to the Creative Commons deed [^S02]. The collection page shows a fixed edition of 404 and five attributes: Color space, Vibratory accord, Basic composition, Edge type and Striation Maxi [^S01].

Each output is a still image of one to four rectangular panels, arranged in a row or a column, each filled with an interference pattern: fine moiré textures, looping petal and lemniscate forms, spotted cellular fields, soft glowing volumes. The colour comes from one of 67 named palettes [^S02][^S06]. The mint text calls a photon's experience of time and space "non-dual" and says that some components "look like images from an electron microscope" while others "have a more cosmic or planetary vista" [^S02][^S07].

Rayner's artist site lists Photon's Dream between his Art Blocks Curated project Fontana and an unreleased series, Waveform Artifact, which he describes as later and earlier explorations of the same algorithm [^S07]. The work is a public, fixed edition of an idea he had been developing privately for a long time.

## Conception and development

Rayner published a long essay on the project on 28 May 2022, eighteen days before release, headed "Drops 15th June" [^S08]. It is the main primary source for the work's conception. He writes that the project "grew out of a series of tools I developed to explore and build intuitions about a geometric object I have been fascinated with for over two decades", an object he calls a Protofield: a wave field that, combined in specific ways, produces interference patterns belonging to "a more complex class of objects called quasicrystals" [^S08]. He describes the field as containing "a finite expression of an infinite set of all possible scales of radial waves", which makes it a building block for great variety from few primitives [^S08].

The essay also sets out an artistic argument. Rayner distinguishes a "subject" from a "visual language" and names the waveform primitive as his subject of more than twenty years [^S08]. He discusses flatness against illusionistic space, from Velázquez and Vermeer to Hokusai. He says he wanted Photon's Dream to include both "a very flat surface-texture feel" and outputs that "looked more like objects in illusionistic space", and that the most successful are those "that contain both" [^S08]. He frames the Art Blocks format as the old challenge of "variety within unity", and imagines a future archaeologist reverse-engineering an algorithm from its outputs [^S08].

A second essay, published the same day, explains the traits. Rayner first found assigning features to art "a jarring requirement". He came to treat them as a "rich title surrogate" and removed all numeric features "in favor of trying to create names that had a more poetic or simply descriptive expression" [^S09]. He named the 67 palettes in one morning, "the first thing that sprang into my mind", and designed the rarest attributes to "correlate with the edge cases where the most wild outputs live" [^S09]. Those palette names, such as Safe journey, Blue honey and I was never not here, are the Color space trait [^S03].

## How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 14,081 bytes, SHA-256 `147b64f95af9a4a3fab3ee4e3db30b6ada28dce4ea85def45096f038b11cc234` [^S02]. The renderer serves an inline script with the same digest and loads no library [^S06]. It was read in full; no code is reproduced here.

It opens with a table of 67 palettes, each a row of 17 numbers controlling hue offset, saturation curves, colour tints, desaturation and texture [^S02]. Randomness comes from Art Blocks' standard two-stream generator, seeded from the two halves of the hash and warmed up with a million draws. The program then discards another 73 draws before making any choice [^S02]. It picks an edge mode (1 to 3), a panel count from a list weighted towards three, and whether panels run as rows or columns. Then it picks, for each panel, a relative size, a symmetry order between 2 and 72, one of five wave modes, a frequency, a power, and a "transparency" that hollows the pattern [^S02]. Last come the palette, a margin size, and a one-in-six chance of the striated "Maxi" treatment when there are three or more panels in the third edge mode [^S02].

Every pixel of every panel is then computed directly. For each of the panel's symmetry directions, the pixel is rotated and passed through an inversion that maps the plane onto a disc: the hyperbolic geometry the artist names. A cosine of that angle, modulated by the panel's wave mode, is summed across all directions [^S02]. Summing many rotated waves is how quasicrystal interference patterns are made. The inversion is what bends them into petals, lemniscates and receding spirals. The sum passes through a tone curve and the palette's colour transform. A small random grain is added per pixel, and edges are shaded or feathered according to the edge mode [^S02]. There is no animation, no input handling and no sound [^S02][^S06].

The canvas is sized to the browser window at the device's pixel ratio, and the panels divide whatever space there is [^S02]. The index's aspect ratio of 0.8 is therefore nominal. The collection page's display notes say so directly: "Outputs are aspect ratio agnostic in live view and full screen", and viewers are advised to resize the window before opening [^S01]. Because the grain draws depend on the pixel count, the fine texture differs between window sizes, while at a fixed size the render repeats exactly [^S02][^S06].

A reimplementation of the choice sequence reproduces all five published traits on all 404 tokens [^S03]. Basic composition is the panel count and orientation, with Single ignoring orientation. Edge type combines the edge mode with the single-panel case and the wide-margin case, which is labelled "wideboy". Striation Maxi is the one-in-six treatment, found on 24 tokens [^S03]. Color space is the palette index, and all 67 palettes occur. Vibratory accord is a grouping of palettes: seven are Primordial, three Spectrum jam, and the rest divided between Ancient color and Big pop [^S03].

## The mint

Four tokens, invocations 0 to 3, were minted on 23 May 2022 between 18:20:46 and 18:34:37 UTC, before the index's activation at 00:07:09 UTC on 24 May [^S03][^S02]. The artist's essay, published on 28 May, announced the drop for 15 June [^S08]. The index start is 15 June 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, which the collection page shows as 16 June in a browser ten hours ahead [^S02][^S01].

The sale was slow. The first public mint came at 17:12:16 UTC, twelve minutes after the start; eleven tokens were minted in the first hour, 51 in the first day and 106 in the first week [^S03]. The last token was minted on 4 July at 14:20:58 UTC, which is also the recorded completion, 18.9 days after the start [^S03][^S02]. The index's current price field reads 0, and the collection page carries no sales notes, so the mint price and mechanism are not documented in the sources inspected [^S02][^S01]. At retrieval the 404 tokens were held by 208 addresses [^S03].

## Copyright and licensing

The index records `CC BY-NC-SA 4.0` and links it to the Creative Commons deed, so, unusually for this batch, the label is tied to a specific document [^S02]. The deed permits sharing and adaptation with attribution, prohibits commercial use, and requires adaptations to carry the same licence [^S10]. Anyone may share or remix a Photon's Dream image non-commercially with credit, under the same terms; token holders gain no commercial right from the licence. The display notes point to high-resolution downloads on the artist's pattern.co site, which were not examined [^S01].

The program carries no licence statement, so the code's own terms are unknown [^S02]. It uses no third-party library [^S02][^S06].

## Close reading of examples

Four tokens were rendered side by side in the official renderer on the generator's origin, then two were re-rendered at a different window shape [^S04][^S06]. They cover the AB5D holding, a single-panel "Crop", the rare striated treatment and a single-panel "Live hermetic".

**Photon's Dream #315** (token `313000315`, held by an address in the AB5D linked-wallet set [^S05]) is a Quadruple column in the Safe journey palette with the wide-margin edge [^S04]. It was observed across three renders over about thirty seconds. In a portrait frame, a large central panel carries a figure-of-eight form: two sets of concentric loops meet at a bright knot, in purple, orange and acid green, fading to white at upper right. Narrow flanking strips on either side carry striped and spotted textures, all inside a white margin [^S06]. The render took about 4.4 seconds and then held; signatures sampled six seconds apart were identical [^S06]. Re-rendered in a 2:1 landscape window, the same four panels reappeared, re-proportioned. The central loops widened into a horizontal butterfly and the strips became short columns [^S06]. Returned to the original size, the render matched the first one exactly [^S06]. The work is deterministic at a given size and deliberately fluid in shape, as the display notes promise [^S01].

**Photon's Dream #15** (token `313000015`) is a single full-bleed panel in the Intellectual color palette, Spectrum jam, with the Crop edge [^S04]. It rendered in about 1.2 seconds, the fastest of the four, and shows a cellular field of leopard-like spots in cream, black, red and teal. The spots tighten towards a central vertical band of fine multicoloured stripes, like a spectrum seen through a slit [^S06].

**Photon's Dream #57** (token `313000057`) is one of 24 Striation Maxi tokens, a Triple row [^S04]. The reimplementation gives it one panel of high symmetry and two of order 2 [^S03]. On screen, a thin top band of dense vertical striations sits over a row of small cells with capsule-shaped highlights. A large lower panel holds a smooth, soft form in dark green, orange and cream [^S06]. In the landscape re-render the lower panel's form moved and stretched into a tall orange column on a green field, which shows how much of this work's composition belongs to the window [^S06].

**Photon's Dream #14** (token `313000014`) is a single panel in Safe journey with a hermetic edge [^S04]. It is a fine moiré of purple and gold interference lines inside a thin border, dense enough to read as woven metal [^S06]. It and #315 share a palette and look entirely different, which makes the artist's point about palettes as emotional cues rather than descriptions [^S09].

None of the four has controls or sound [^S02][^S06].

## Significance and limitations

Photon's Dream is the public edition of a long private study. Its geometry is a direct expression of the artist's stated subject, radial wave fields summed into quasicrystals and bent through a hyperbolic inversion, rather than a set of shapes decorated with noise [^S02][^S08]. Its traits are unusually well aligned with the program. All five reproduce exactly, and their poetic names were a deliberate choice the artist explained at the time [^S03][^S09]. And it is one of the few works in this batch that openly gives its aspect ratio to the viewer's screen [^S01].

The sources do not settle the price or the reasons for the slow sale, and the pre-activation mints of 23 May are unexplained.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What was the mint price and mechanism? The index field reads 0 and no sales notes are published.
2. Were the four mints on 23 May artist or test mints?
3. How do the renders at the artist's recommended aspect ratios compare with the platform's stored stills?
4. What do the high-resolution downloads on pattern.co add, and under what terms are they offered?

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [Photon's Dream by Harvey Rayner | patterndotco, collection page](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/photons-dream-by-harvey-rayner-or-patterndotco). Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S02]: Art Blocks. [Art Blocks public GraphQL index, projects_metadata for project 313, including the complete program](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S03]: Art Blocks. [Art Blocks public GraphQL index, tokens_metadata for all 404 tokens of project 313](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S04]: Art Blocks. [Art Blocks public GraphQL index, tokens_metadata for the four example tokens of project 313](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S05]: Art Blocks. [Art Blocks public GraphQL index, user_profiles for the AB5D collection](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S06]: Art Blocks. [Art Blocks live renderer for project 313 tokens](https://generator.artblocks.io/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/313000315). Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S07]: Harvey Rayner. [Harvey Rayner, works 2022](https://rayner.art/works/2022/#photons-dream). Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S08]: Harvey Rayner. [Photon's Dream: A long form generative art project built from waveform primitives and quasicrystals emergent structures](https://medium.com/p/5c638e4177c9). Published 2022-05-28. Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S09]: Harvey Rayner. [NFT features: An opportunity to provide a rich and expressive title substitute for long form generative artworks](https://medium.com/@harvey.rayner/nft-features-an-opportunity-to-provide-a-rich-and-expressive-title-substitute-for-long-form-cbfbf800621f). Published 2022-05-28. Accessed 2026-09-20.
[^S10]: Creative Commons. [Deed: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Accessed 2026-09-20.