Quarantine

The work and its context

Quarantine is Art Blocks project 183 on the contract at 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, on Ethereum mainnet, credited to Owen Moore. The indexed record returns 128 invocations against a maximum of 128, a declared dependency of three@0.124.0, and a display_static value of false ¹. The project page describes it as an Art Blocks 500 release in the Factory category and carries no badges at all: neither animated nor interactive ². That absence turns out to be the accurate description, and the index field is the one that misleads.

What you see is a specimen. A dark square, vignetted at the corners, holds a single symmetrical form built by raymarching a signed distance field: a lattice of soft tubes and nodes, mirrored and repeated around a centre, lit from within. The palettes are muted and organic, olive and maroon, amber and rust, or no colour at all. The overwhelming impression is of something seen down a microscope on a slide.

The mint description commits fully to that reading, and it is written in character: an unknown illness has struck the world, humanity enters quarantine, and "as you look upon samples through the microscope glass, you can't help but wonder what horrors you're about to witness" ¹. Four traits carry the conceit further, and their names are the reason this project needs careful handling. Every token is labelled with a Stage, a Hazard, a Variant and a Risk level ³.

The artist's own statement, published on his studio site, says something the mint text does not. Quarantine is described there as "a humorous artwork inspired by the visual style of scientific classification charts", a "mock study" in which "an unnamed scientist appears to document a newly discovered disease". The artist states it was made during the COVID-19 pandemic, "a period marked by both extraordinary scientific effort and a widespread rise in misinformation", and that "rather than addressing the issue directly, the work adopts a satirical framing" ⁴.

That difference matters for a catalogue. Read from the Art Blocks page alone, Quarantine is a sincere piece of pandemic horror. Read with the artist's statement, it is satire about the aesthetics of authority: the chart, the label, the confident classification of something nobody understands. The Hazard trait includes Alien and Nanotech alongside Biological and Chemical ³, which is the tell, and the Variant names run through the Greek alphabet in the World Health Organization's naming convention but begin at Beta rather than Alpha.

Two further facts should be fixed before the essay proceeds. The work is not animated: it renders twice and stops ¹⁵. And 27 of its 128 tokens were minted before the public sale opened ³, which is an unusual proportion and is discussed under the mint.

Conception and development

The website recorded against the project is the artist's studio domain root rather than a project page ¹². It resolves, and the studio site carries an artwork index in which Quarantine appears with a statement and a separate gallery page of token images ⁴⁶. So unlike several projects in this batch the link of record is not broken; it is merely unspecific, and a cataloguer following it lands on a site index and has to find the work.

The indexed interview field is null ¹ and no dated development account was located. What the artist does publish about the work is the short statement quoted above, which gives three things: the visual reference, the intent, and the period.

The visual reference is scientific classification charts, and it explains the composition better than any description of the algorithm would. These images are not attempting to look like organisms. They are attempting to look like the plates in a taxonomy: one specimen, centred, isolated on a dark ground, symmetrical enough to read as a diagram, annotated elsewhere by the labels that the trait system supplies. The artist describes the elements as "arranged and labeled as though documenting the stages of an unknown organism" ⁴.

The intent is satirical, and the artist is specific about the target: not the disease but the epistemics around it, "a widespread rise in misinformation" set against "extraordinary scientific effort" ⁴. The satire is carried almost entirely by the metadata rather than by the pictures. A viewer looking at token 13 sees a grey symmetrical form; a viewer reading its traits sees that an unnamed authority has classified it as Biological, Medium risk, Variant Epsilon, Stage Mortem. The joke is the confidence of the label.

The period is the COVID-19 pandemic, and the project released in October 2021. The artist's studio index categorises the work as "WebGL" and "Long Form", and elsewhere on the site lists it under the heading "MATHEMATICAL RAYMARCH" ⁴, which is an accurate one-line description of the technique and is corroborated by reading the program.

The artist's other work on the same site is consistently systems-based and often audio-reactive, including projects described as orthographic audio visualisation and synthesised audio and visuals ⁴. Quarantine is the one with a joke in it.

What cannot be established from the available record is the development chronology: when the piece was begun, how the six Stage names or the four Hazard categories were chosen, or whether the Variant names beginning at Beta was deliberate. No source consulted addresses any of those.

How the work was constructed

The program was retrieved from the indexed project record by an HTTP POST to the Art Blocks public GraphQL endpoint, using a named operation filtered on the exact slug, with the returned composite identity key corroborating contract and project ¹. The record reports a script count of 1. The program is 4,826 bytes and hashes to SHA-256 70cc8c8ad4aaee795750cb35bbdaecb72d18e07550fd6b50ee7d547e516bbccb. It was read in full. No artist code is reproduced in this package.

Almost all of it is one GLSL fragment shader, stored as a string and compiled at runtime onto a full-screen quad in three.js. The JavaScript around it is small: it reads the hash, computes a dozen uniform values, builds a scene with an orthographic camera and one plane, and renders.

The shader is written in an abbreviated dialect that is itself worth noting. It opens with a block of macro definitions collapsing the language to single letters, so that vec3 becomes V, float becomes F, mix becomes X, clamp becomes A, and so on ¹. That is a size optimisation for on-chain storage, and it is the reason a program that raymarches a distance field, applies polar repetition and mirroring, computes surface normals by finite differences, applies six different colour treatments and supersamples the result fits in under five kilobytes.

The hash is split into 32 bytes and eleven of them are used. The mapping was reimplemented independently and run against all 128 token hashes, then compared with the published features ³, and three of the four traits reproduce exactly.

Stage reproduces at 128 of 128. Its source is a threshold function applied to the first byte, mapping it to one of six buckets with deliberately uneven widths. Those buckets are the Stage names, in order: Mortem, Acute, Spreading, Invasive, Exposure, Recovery. Because the bucket widths differ, so do the rarities, and Mortem is the rarest at 8 tokens while Recovery is the commonest at 42 ³.

That same value drives a six-way branch in the shader's colouring, and one of those branches is worth stating because it is visible and exact. When the value is zero, the branch that corresponds to Stage Mortem, the shader replaces each of its three palette colours with the average of its own channels ¹. The result is a greyscale image. Sampling the full canvas of a Mortem token returned a maximum separation between the largest and smallest channel, across all 438,244 pixels, of exactly zero ⁵. The stage named for death is the only one with no colour in it at all, and that is measurable rather than impressionistic.

Variant reproduces at 128 of 128. It comes from a polar repetition count: a byte is raised to a power, mapped to the range two to ten and rounded, and the shader folds the plane into that many sectors. The published names run Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa for counts two through ten ³. So the Greek letter is literally the number of times the specimen repeats around its centre, and Kappa, the rarest at three tokens, is the one folded into ten.

Hazard reproduces at 128 of 128. Its source is the hue parameter, which is derived from the sum of two hash bytes and mapped to a range from minus 0.9 to 1.1. The shader tests that value against four branches, and those four branches are the four Hazard names: below minus 0.6 gives Nanotech, above 0.6 gives Alien, between 0.2 and 0.6 gives Chemical, and everything between minus 0.6 and 0.2 gives Biological ¹³. Because the parameter is the sum of two bytes its distribution is triangular rather than flat, which is why Biological covers 62 tokens and Nanotech only 9.

Risk does not reproduce. It has three values and it clearly tracks the detail-scale parameter derived from the fourth byte, but not cleanly: across the edition, Low occupies that parameter's range from 0.3043 to 0.3992 and High occupies 0.2031 to 0.2675, which do not overlap each other, while Medium straddles both at 0.229 to 0.3529 ³. A scan of all 32 hash bytes found no byte whose values separate the three Risk labels into disjoint ranges, and combining the parameter with the mirroring switch or the repetition count did not separate them either. The structure is consistent with a second variable pushing tokens into the Medium band, and that variable was not identified. It is reported as unresolved rather than covered by a fitted threshold.

The rendering sequence is the last mechanism, and it is the one that decides how this work should be presented. The canvas is created with a CSS filter applying a twelve-pixel blur at sixty per cent brightness and sixty per cent opacity. The scene is rendered once at a sampling uniform of one, which is a fast, rough preview. The uniform is then set to sixteen and a single animation frame is requested; the handler waits 200 milliseconds, renders again at sixteen by sixteen samples per pixel, and clears the CSS filter ¹. Two renders, then nothing. There is no time uniform anywhere in the shader, no loop, and no interaction handler of any kind.

What that produces for a viewer is a deliberate focusing effect: the image arrives blurred and dim, as though through a microscope being adjusted, and then snaps into sharp focus. Observed in the renderer, all four tokens sampled had completed this sequence before the first measurement and held byte-identical canvas signatures across four-second windows with the CSS filter already cleared ⁵. The work is finished within a second of loading and never changes again.

The mint

Four events need separating, and this project's chronology has a feature the others in this batch do not.

The first token was minted on 12 October 2021 at 18:37:48 UTC ³. The project was activated on 23 October 2021 at 18:04:15 UTC ¹. The public opening, recorded as the project start datetime, was on 29 October 2021 at 16:00:00 UTC ¹. The project page displays "Released on 30 October 2021", which is that opening rendered in a timezone ahead of UTC ². Completion, the final mint, was on 26 December 2021 at 16:19:19 UTC ¹³.

The unusual feature is the volume of pre-opening activity. Twenty-seven of the 128 tokens, invocations 0 through 26, were minted before the public opening ³, across 12 to 17 October, which is also before the project was activated. In the other projects examined in this batch the pre-opening count is one, the artist proof. Twenty-seven is a fifth of the edition. This package records the count and the timestamps as observed and does not assert an explanation: no allowlist, presale or artist-mint arrangement is documented in any source consulted, and the project page publishes no sales note of any kind ².

After the opening the pace was moderate: 9 tokens in the first hour, 19 more during the rest of the first day, 17 across days two to seven, 28 across days eight to thirty, and the final 28 across the remaining weeks ³. The sale duration from public opening to final mint is 58.0 days, calculated as the final mint at 2021-12-26T16:19:19Z minus the opening at 2021-10-29T16:00:00Z divided into days ¹³.

The index reports a current price of 0.1 ETH ¹. Because no sales note is published for this project, this package does not assert an original mint mechanism or price. Whether 0.1 ETH was a fixed price, an auction resting price or a later value is not established, and inferring a Dutch auction from comparable projects in the same period would be guesswork.

Copyright and licensing

The artwork licence the platform reports is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, and the index carries no link for it: the link_to_license field is null ¹. The project details panel on the live page publishes edition size, website, library, aspect ratio, blockchain, token standard, contract type and the attribute list, and no licence field ².

The canonical deed for that identifier was read in full during this session ⁷. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International permits only sharing: copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format. It conditions that on attribution, requiring appropriate credit, a link to the licence and an indication of whether changes were made. It prohibits commercial use. And its third condition is the one that distinguishes it from every other licence in this batch: "If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material" ⁷. The deed also states that it is not itself the licence and has no legal value, and that no warranties are given, so publicity, privacy or moral rights may still apply ⁷.

Two consequences follow for anyone presenting this work.

The NoDerivatives term is a direct constraint on cataloguing practice. A cropped detail, a recoloured reproduction, a composite plate of several tokens, or a still that has been adjusted for print are all modifications, and the licence as reported does not permit distributing them. This package creates none, and the presentation record accordingly instructs that no altered derivative be produced.

The label is unlinked, so it remains a reported value rather than a verified grant. The deed read here is the canonical document for that exact identifier, which is a stronger position than a licence name with no canonical form, but nothing in the project record points to it and no signed or artist-published instrument was located.

Code rights are separate and are recorded as unknown. No licence statement or copyright notice appears anywhere in the program ¹. On-chain storage makes the program retrievable; it does not make it redistributable, which is why this package reproduces its digest, its measured behaviour and a description rather than any of its text.

The declared dependency, three@0.124.0, carries its own upstream licensing, which was not inspected and is recorded separately as unknown ¹. The shader source is the artist's own, written inside the program, and carries no separate notice.

Close reading of examples

Four tokens were opened in the original renderer and inspected, with the sketch's own uniform values read alongside the image so that each published trait could be checked against the parameter that produced it. Two are treated at length. Every canonical token page below returned HTTP 200 when fetched during this session ⁵.

Quarantine #31, token 183000031, is the AB5D holding and the proposed header work. Ownership was verified rather than assumed: the complete linked wallet set was refreshed from the AB5D profile during this session and returned three addresses, and this token's indexed owner is the third of them ⁸³. Its published traits give Stage Recovery, Hazard Biological, Variant Beta and Risk Low ³.

On screen it is the most organic of the four. A near-black field, vignetted, holds a bilaterally symmetrical form in dusty rose and olive: two vertical lobes joined at a narrow waist, flanked by rows of small pale-green nodes that recede toward the edges like cells in a culture. It reads convincingly as a specimen, and it is also plainly a diagram, because the mirroring is exact.

Reading the uniforms confirmed every trait at once. The stage value was 5, which is the Recovery bucket. The hue parameter was minus 0.0953, which falls in the band that yields Biological. The repetition count was 2, which is Beta. The detail parameter was 0.3733, at the top of the range that corresponds to Low risk ⁵. The mirroring parameter was 0.2894, above the threshold at which the shader enables mirroring, which is why the form is symmetrical rather than free. The canvas measured 662 by 662, the CSS focusing filter had already cleared, and two signatures four seconds apart were identical ⁵.

Quarantine #13, token 183000013, is the sustained counterpart and the clearest demonstration that this project's traits are not decoration. Its published traits give Stage Mortem, the rarest of the six at 8 tokens in the edition, with Hazard Biological, Variant Epsilon and Risk Med ³.

On screen it has no colour. A pale grey form, symmetrical about both axes, spreads across a black field in fronds and spines, with a dense knot at the centre. It looks like a frost pattern or an X-ray plate. Reading the uniforms gave a stage value of 0, the Mortem bucket, and the shader's branch for that value replaces each palette colour with the average of its own channels ¹⁵. The consequence was measured rather than described: across all 438,244 pixels on the canvas the largest difference between any pixel's maximum and minimum channel is exactly zero, so every pixel satisfies red equals green equals blue ⁵. The image is not merely desaturated; it is exactly grey. In a work whose subject is the labelling of a disease, the token labelled for death is the one the algorithm drains of colour, and that relationship is in the code rather than in the eye of the reader.

Quarantine #11, token 183000011, carries Hazard Nanotech, the rarest of the four hazards at 9 tokens ³. On screen it is a radial burst: concentric rings of amber and gold spokes on near-black, dense at the rim and dissolving toward a dark centre, with none of the bilateral structure of the other three. Its hue parameter read minus 0.7516, below the threshold that yields Nanotech, and its repetition count was 5, matching Variant Epsilon ⁵. Its detail parameter was 0.2133, the low end that corresponds to High risk, and the image is correspondingly finer-grained than the others.

Quarantine #7, token 183000007, carries Variant Kappa, the rarest variant in the edition at three tokens, together with Hazard Chemical, Stage Acute and Risk High ³. On screen it is the most diagrammatic: a broad rose and amber disc ringed by a scalloped border of small gold forms, with a ring of dark dots near the centre arranged like a dial. Its repetition count read 10, which is Kappa and the maximum the program can produce; its hue parameter read 0.3187, inside the Chemical band; its stage value read 1, which is Acute ⁵. Ten-fold symmetry is what makes it look manufactured rather than grown, and it is the token in this group that most resembles the classification-chart plate the artist describes.

On motion and sound: all four tokens had completed their two-render sequence before the first measurement and held identical canvas signatures across four-second windows, with the CSS focusing filter cleared ⁵. No token was observed changing. No interaction was attempted because the program defines no key, mouse or touch handler ¹, and the project page carries no interactive badge ². Every session was silent: the document contained no audio or video elements, the only script loaded was three.js at version 0.124.0 with no audio component, and the program contains no audio call ⁵¹. Nothing was heard, and there is no audio path on which playback could have been attempted.

Significance and limitations

The interesting thing about Quarantine is that its meaning lives in its metadata, and its metadata is the part a catalogue is most likely to reproduce without comment.

The pictures are handsome raymarched specimens, and on their own they are ambiguous: symmetrical organic forms on dark grounds, of the kind generative art produces in quantity. What makes the project a work rather than a set of renders is the labelling system laid over it, and the labels are a joke with a target. The artist says so directly: a mock study, satirical, made during a pandemic marked by "a widespread rise in misinformation" ⁴. The Hazard vocabulary gives the game away by including Alien and Nanotech beside Biological and Chemical, and the Variant vocabulary borrows the World Health Organization's Greek-letter convention while starting at Beta.

That reading is not available from the Art Blocks page. The mint description is written in character and reads as sincere pandemic horror ¹, and nothing on the platform flags it as satire. A dossier that publishes the mint blurb and the trait table without the artist's statement will present the work as the thing it is parodying. This is the single most consequential finding here and it costs nothing to fix: the artist's statement is published and citable.

Three of the four traits reproduce exactly from the hash, and each corresponds to a visible property rather than an arbitrary label. Stage is a six-way colour treatment, and its rarest value is the one that removes colour entirely. Variant is the number of times the specimen repeats around its centre, so a Kappa token is tenfold symmetric and a Beta token is bilateral. Hazard is which of four hue branches the shader takes. A reader given those three relationships can look at any token in the edition and predict two of its labels before checking. Risk is the exception and remains unexplained.

On presentation, the platform record and the page disagree and the page is right. The index reports display_static false; the page carries no animated badge and no interactive badge; and the program renders twice within a second and then stops forever. Presenting Quarantine with a loop or a play control would invent behaviour the work does not have. What it does have is a one-second focusing gesture, blurred to sharp, which a still image cannot show and which is worth preserving by using the live renderer.

The limitations of this package should be stated plainly. Four of 128 tokens were observed, and the two-render behaviour of the other 124 rests on reading the program rather than watching each one; in all four cases the sequence had completed before the first sample, so the focusing transition itself was inferred from the code and from the initial CSS filter rather than captured mid-transition. Risk is unreproduced, with the scan that failed documented in the evidence. The 27 pre-opening mints are recorded as observed without an explanation, because none is documented. No on-chain price history was read and no mint mechanism is asserted. The artist's statement is a primary source but it is the artist's own account, and the satirical intent is reported as the artist's stated intent rather than as a property this research verified independently.

Unresolved research questions, stated explicitly:

What determines Risk? Three labels, a clear association with the detail-scale parameter, no single hash byte that separates them, and no combination tested here that does. A second variable is implied and was not identified.

Why were 27 tokens minted before the project was activated and before the public opening? No allowlist, presale or artist-mint arrangement is documented in any source consulted, and the project publishes no sales note.

What was the original mint mechanism and price? Not established, for the same reason.

Why do the Variant names begin at Beta rather than Alpha? The convention borrowed is the World Health Organization's, in which Alpha exists. Whether the omission is deliberate is not addressed by any located source.

Does the satirical framing predate the work or postdate it? The mint description is written entirely in character and the statement identifying the work as humorous appears only on the artist's own site; which came first, and whether the platform text was meant to be read straight, is not established.