Running Moon

The work and its context

Running Moon is a 500-edition generative art series by Licia He, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 334. The registry records the heritage placement "curated series 8", and the artist's own project page calls it the first release of Art Blocks Curated Series 8.¹² Each output is an abstract field of interlocking organic shapes soldered together by brush-pen-like stripes, in palettes that run from icy cyan to deep teal night; the rendering is inspired by stained glass and watercolor.¹³

The official description reads: "Running Moon depicts the nuanced interaction between clouds and moonlight. It is a search for boundaries between structure and fluidity, precision and errors. It is a quest for harmony. The rendering of Running Moon is inspired by stained glass and watercolor. It captures the sharpness of the glass and the softness of light using abstract forms. As organic shapes gradually expand to fill the space, brush-pen-like stripes solder these pieces together to form intricate compositions."¹

The AB5D dossier describes He as an artist for whom algorithms are "scores for color, matter, and machines", treating "code as a visual language and the plotter as a collaborator". Born in 1992 in China, she lives and works in Tokyo, practices full-time, and founded The Generative Craft Lab, Ltd; her training spans studio art, computer science, and doctoral research in information science.⁴ Running Moon is her only work in the AB500 set, and her collector-metric rank stands at 190 of 308.⁴ The series runs as plain JavaScript with no framework (script type js@na) at a landscape aspect ratio of about 1.4 with zero external assets, under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.¹

Conception and development

The concept began in pigment, not code. In the Art Blocks interview published two days before the release, He told Jeff Davis: "The concept started with a watercolor painting I made in 2021. It was created right after my dissertation defense, so the painting was filled with joy and excitement. It marked the start of a new chapter. I loved the painting and developed a python-based algorithm that captured part of the concept."⁵ The title's natural imagery is real but indirect: "Running Moon is a result of such an indoor solitude experience. However, when I was creating Running Moon, I was thinking about the wind, the clouds, the moon, the stars, and the vast universe. It was fascinating how machines and digital creation became a bridge for me to connect with nature."⁵

Her path to this work runs through an accidental education. She entered college as an English major, failed to get into any English 101 classes in her first semester, landed in Photography 101 instead, became a printmaker, and later turned her doctoral research toward generative craft after meeting her first plotters in 2019: "Writing code for my plotters was the most exciting part of my daily activities, especially during the lockdown."⁵ The dossier compresses her method into three pillars: systems, robots, and materials.⁴

Her own project page names the compositional grammar directly. Running Moon has three major elements: Expansion Shapes, of which there are ten types, each producing curves with unique characteristics; Segmenting Lines, grouped into five categories, imposed to balance the composition the way physical stained glass is constrained by production requirements; and Texture, plus five special modes that add effects after the core composition and main color scheme are determined.² She calls it "the most intricate web-based generative art system I have developed so far".²

How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug running-moon-by-licia-he and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 334. The retrieved script is 38,360 bytes with SHA-256 digest 205bb5b5e23f51890ecd6782b6f8b1590f633805d65f93aa33ac2ccfbb18d104, and it was read in full.¹⁶

The script is minified dependency-free JavaScript drawing to a 2D canvas; the registry script type is js@na, meaning no library at all.¹⁶ Deterministic randomness comes from a dual-stream arrangement: two sfc32 generators, prngA seeded from the first 32 hexadecimal characters of the token hash and prngB from the next 32, with a toggle that alternates between the two streams on successive calls.⁶ Rendering is progressive through requestAnimationFrame, which is how the organic shapes visibly expand to fill the space as the description promises; on the live renderer the draw-down completes fast enough that intermediate frames could not be captured in a headless probe at 300-millisecond intervals.¹⁶⁷ The page creates a 2000 by 1428 pixel canvas, matching the registry aspect ratio of about 1.4.⁶⁷

The only event listeners are for window resize and change; there are no keyboard, pointer, or audio pathways anywhere in the script, and the live page contains zero audio or video elements.⁶⁷ In the live check of token 334000423 the reported hash matched the chain record exactly, and the rendered frame matched the platform preview pixel-for-composition.⁷

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows the fastest sale in this batch.¹⁸ Edition 0 was minted on July 1, 2022 at 22:37:44 UTC, twelve days before the public sale, and the project was activated on July 7, 2022 at 22:57:46 UTC.¹ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads July 13, 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, and the official collection page carries "Released Jul 13, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC".¹⁹ The artist's site gives the same moment in local time: launched Wednesday, July 13th, at 12 pm CDT.²

The public sale lasted two minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Edition 1 minted at 17:00:17 UTC, editions 10 and 20 within the same minute at 17:00:35, the AB5D treasury's edition 423 at 17:02:00 UTC, and editions 498 and 499 together at 17:02:39 UTC, the recorded completion time.¹⁸ The minted count equals the maximum of 500, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.¹ The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.¹ The artist's site records that 25% of the proceeds from the primary sale were donated to the AnitaB Institute and Girls Who Code, "to support female and non-binary technologists".² The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 423, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.⁸¹⁰

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0" for Running Moon, with the terms URL recorded in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.¹ The deed grants the freedom to Share, to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, under three conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes; and NoDerivatives, sharing only the unadapted material. The deed forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.¹¹

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.⁶ The registry lists zero external asset dependencies, and the script type js@na confirms there is no runtime library either; the work is self-contained JavaScript.¹⁶ Owning a Running Moon token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.⁸

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.⁷³

Edition 423 (token 334000423, minted July 13, 2022 at 17:02:00 UTC, two minutes into the sale), the AB5D-held header, is the yellow-grey composition: layered horizontal strata of blue-grey and white forms with sharp yellow shapes surfacing through the stack, stitched over by fine blue and green pen-line textures.⁸¹⁰³ In the live view the renderer reproduced the same composition from the chain hash, drew down to completion, and sat still; the page holds no audio and no interactive controls beyond window resize.⁷

Edition 0 (token 334000000, the pre-activation mint of July 1, 2022) is the icy one: an all-cyan lattice of diamond segmenting lines over pale organic shapes with small orange and navy accents, the most openly "stained glass" of the sample.⁸³ Edition 1 (token 334000001, the first public mint) turns to sage and grey-green with diagonal sweeping bands and a few deep orange forms.⁸³

Edition 10 (token 334000010) is the warm extreme: a cream field radiating with saturated orange segments, pale blue shards, and a fan of lines thrown from the lower left corner.⁸³ Edition 20 (token 334000020) is the night piece: deep teal and green forms with electric-green and blue highlights, the closest the sample comes to literal moonlight.⁸³ Across the five, the grammar is constant, expansion shapes cut by segmenting lines and cross-hatched with texture; the palette swings from glacier to citrus to night.³

Significance and limitations

Running Moon is the batch's clearest case of painting translated into a system: a watercolor made after a dissertation defense became a Python algorithm and then a 500-edition JavaScript engine, released as the first drop of Art Blocks Curated Series 8 and sold out in two minutes thirty-nine seconds.¹⁸²⁵ Its stated donation of 25% of primary proceeds to the AnitaB Institute and Girls Who Code ties the work's economics to its author's stated commitments.²

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the July 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.¹
• The registry's raw curation_status field reads "factory" while its display and heritage fields read "curated" and "curated series 8", and the artist's site calls it the first Curated Series 8 release; the raw-field discrepancy is recorded, not resolved.¹²
• The progressive expansion described in the artist's text completes too quickly to capture intermediate frames in a headless probe; the mechanism is documented from the script's requestAnimationFrame loop and the artist's description rather than from frame captures.¹⁶⁷
• The registry records script_count 4 for this project; the meaning of the count (likely on-chain script revisions) is not documented in the inspected sources.¹
• The purpose of the dual alternating sfc32 streams is not explained in any inspected source; the alternation is documented from the code alone.⁶