Scribbled Boundaries

The shape inside the tangle

Scribbled Boundaries #695, verified in the AB5D collection, looks at first like an accumulation of fine dark threads. A dense blue-black field surrounds a paler, loosely angular interior, where faint yellow and warmer marks remain visible. The lower region is especially crowded. Loops escape the apparent perimeter, so its rectangular shape is recognizable without becoming a hard container. This held original was inspected directly, and its indexed owner matched the freshly retrieved collector wallet set.¹²

William Tan's 2021 Art Blocks Curated edition comprises 1,024 minted works, also the current maximum. Across the inspected examples, the basic material is consistent: numerous curved, unfilled strokes on white. Their collective organization changes considerably. Some form overlapping blocks; others make dense fields around lighter shapes. The significant unit is therefore neither the isolated line nor a flat geometric silhouette. It is the relationship between wandering marks and the larger constraints that make them gather into an image.³⁴

The live original has a further distinction from a still reproduction. A click enables pointer-controlled displacement of its drawing layers. In #695, moving the pointer between opposite corners produced small visible shifts in their alignment. Nothing in that test suggested newly growing scribbles: the existing drawing changed its registration. The work remains still by default, and the interaction should be described as optional parallax rather than automatic animation.⁴¹

A test that became a drawing language

In his August 12 interview with Jeff Davis, Tan traces the project to testing whether his pseudorandom generator distributed coordinates suitably. The results appealed to him because they resembled pen or coloured-pencil drawings. He identifies Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko and Josef Albers as compositional influences, linking the series to abstraction through colour relationships and apparent simplicity. The interview also places his route into generative art through photography, an ArtCenter class using Processing, and later experimentation with browser-based tools.⁵

His subsequent article, “Generative Scribbling,” explains that the named modes honour abstract artists and that he wanted the fine marks to resemble hand drawing. He also interprets scribbles as thoughts that appear disordered individually but acquire coherence at another scale. These are stated intentions, not conclusions that need to be inferred from a feature label.⁶

The official project description gives that relation between small-scale disorder and larger order a specifically providential meaning. It connects apparently accidental events with a Designer's orchestration. That belief is Tan's conceptual framing, rather than a claim about how random number generators work. Formally, the program makes a comparable distinction available to any viewer: local unpredictability can coexist with a composition whose major regions are deliberately constrained.³⁴

The resulting surface complicates the contrast between mechanical precision and a hand-made mark. A curve may look uncertain or hurried even though its vertices result from repeatable calculations. Equally, a recognizable rectangle need not be painted as a filled rectangle. Its presence can emerge from where successive curves are allowed to pass, how often they accumulate, and which colours overlap.⁴

Drawing by accepting and refusing points

The complete 22,708-byte program is a p5.js 1.0.0 sketch. It parses part of the token hash into a numeric seed and also reads the hash as 32 byte values. A custom bitwise generator produces the subsequent random sequence, reducing its output to increments of one thousandth. Different pairs of hash bytes choose broad colour, composition, thickness and frame settings; the seeded sequence supplies the numerous local variations. There is no imported photograph or scanned pencil texture.⁴

The working coordinate system is a square 100 units wide, scaled to the smaller browser-window dimension. Its standard drawing region extends from 10 to 90 on both axes, although some seeds narrow that region symmetrically. The canvas remains square even when the inner region changes proportion. This distinction matters when reading the indexed “Aspect Ratio” feature: the internal field and the browser canvas are different objects.⁴

Fourteen selectable composition functions assemble instructions for layers. They include split polygons, individual polygons, circles, strips, overlapping rectangles, nested squares and framed arrangements. An instruction carries its permitted region, boundary shapes, iteration amount, stroke-thickness parameters and a closeness value affecting successive steps. Several modes combine foreground and surrounding regions, allowing a shape to appear through contrasting densities rather than an explicit contour.⁴

The scribble class begins an unfilled curved path. After its initial candidate, new coordinates are generated in relation to the previously accepted point. Candidates outside the layer's rectangular region are retried, with a limit that prevents endless searching. Additional tests reject points in circles, strips, blocks or polygons; a positive-polygon mode reverses the relevant test to retain points inside the polygon. Accepted coordinates become p5 curveVertex points, and rejected ones do not replace the previous accepted location.⁴

These are point tests, not a clipping operation on every segment of the completed curve. Connecting accepted vertices can carry a visible curve across an excluded region, and curved interpolation can protrude beyond the range occupied by its control points. This helps explain why the inspected boundaries look permeable. Their organization is statistically and procedurally strong while their edges remain crossed, looped and irregular. Calling them masks that perfectly erase everything outside a shape would misdescribe the actual drawing procedure.⁴

The polygon generator first samples points, finds the leftmost and rightmost, divides the remaining points above and below their connecting line, and orders those groups in opposite horizontal directions. The resulting closed outline is tested with a ray-intersection routine. Composition is therefore assembled from geometry that the program can ask questions about: whether a candidate is inside a region is more important than drawing that region's outline directly.⁴

Colour is generated in HSL coordinates and varied around selected bases. Stroke transparency also depends on the viewport scale before being wrapped into its final range. The hash supplies repeatable decisions, but this scale dependence means that claiming pixel-identical or necessarily identical-opacity results at every display size would go beyond the code. No cross-device equivalence test was performed here.⁴

Most expensive drawing happens once in setup, into offscreen graphics buffers. The draw function clears the visible canvas and composites those buffers. Its move flag starts false. Clicking toggles it, and the active branch translates layers by different small amounts according to pointer position. It contains no sound code and no time-driven evolution of the scribbles. Keeping the original live view available preserves this interaction while a preview records only one aligned state.⁴

The announced auction and the recorded events

Art Blocks dates the public release to August 17, 2021. The indexed first mint occurred earlier, on August 9 at 16:40:25, and activation is recorded on August 12 at 16:18:34. The second mint and indexed start coincide at August 17, 17:00:16; completion follows at 17:31:38. The second-mint-to-completion interval is 31 minutes and 22 seconds. The earlier first token remains a separate event whose purpose is not established by this record.³

Unlike a price history inferred from today's settings, the project description preserves an announced Dutch-auction schedule: 3, 2.5, 2, 1.5, 1.25, 1, 0.75, 0.5 and 0.25 ETH, stepping every five minutes. An August 17 article by Tyler D. Warner independently describes those starting, interval and floor terms. The current indexed price is 0.75 ETH. Its position in the announced sequence is consistent with the recorded completion time, but this research has not audited each configuration change or payment, so the correspondence is evidence of consistency rather than a complete transaction reconstruction.³⁷

Tan later reported that the project raised 222 ETH, approximately $700,000 at the time, for Oxygen for Indonesia.⁶ An Art Blocks newsletter listed $670,382 for the same initiative, while explicitly explaining that its totals could represent reports, funds set aside or pledge calculations. Different dollar figures need not establish a disagreement about the underlying contribution. Neither source by itself provides a recipient-level transfer reconciliation, which remains unresolved.⁸

Artwork, code and display rights

The current project record reports “NIFTY” and supplies no separate licence link. Art Blocks' June 2021 licensing guide identifies that abbreviation with NFT License 2.0. The operative text grants specified owner-dependent uses while retaining the creator's intellectual-property ownership. It is materially different from a Creative Commons permission available to everyone.³⁹¹⁰

Its terms include personal noncommercial use, conditional marketplace and third-party application display, and a limited merchandise permission capped at $100,000 annual gross revenue. They also restrict modification, certain promotional uses and attempts to acquire additional intellectual-property rights in the art. The third-party display provision includes ownership verification and a visibility condition when an owner leaves. A current wallet match therefore establishes the artwork's collection relationship without demonstrating that every conceivable persistent website use satisfies the licence.¹⁰

The presentation points to the unchanged official original and preview, with attribution and the reported rights label; it does not claim a general public reproduction grant. No separate licence for Tan's artist program was found. The p5.js library has its own LGPL 2.1 terms, which should not be transferred onto the artwork or assumed to license the entire sketch. The research package includes the program's digest and analysis, rather than redistributing its source.⁴¹¹

Four views of controlled accumulation

Editions 0, 1, 10 and 20 were verified through token records and inspected in their original browser renderers. They provide a small comparison of colour and structure, not a statistical account of all 1,024 works. The metadata names below are retained as indexed labels, while the descriptions report what was actually visible.^12131415

Edition #0 is predominantly a loose green field on white. Darker irregular concentrations occupy the upper-right and lower-right areas, with a smaller blue presence to the left. Large, thin loops travel through the relatively open ground. The indexed shape mode is Melita and the thickness mode Richter. Its internal divisions are readable, but their edges feel porous: the coloured areas are made of crossings rather than opaque fills. The airy density keeps individual gestures conspicuous.¹²

Edition #1 is substantially darker. Black and grey curves accumulate strongly along the upper and lower parts of the field, leaving a paler central area crossed by long strokes. Some loops extend far enough to disturb the otherwise square perimeter. Its Kline colour label and Kelly shape label do not turn it into a reproduction of either artist's work; they sit beside a specific procedural result whose broad masses depend on many thin marks. The empty-looking middle is never actually empty.¹³

Edition #10 places a dark blue angular concentration near the centre of a pale, largely purple field. Fainter green and grey zones sit around it, while violet strokes build up at the sides and lower edge. The index identifies Arp as the shape mode. Compared with #1, colour separates the central form from its surroundings more decisively than darkness alone. The surrounding lines continue across the composition, so figure and ground remain entangled even where an internal shape becomes legible.¹⁴

Edition #20 is denser and more muted. Greenish-grey overlapping fields occupy most of the square, with darker horizontal divisions and a narrow bluish-purple vertical concentration near the middle. Its indexed modes include Mark, Kline and Malevich for shape, colour and thickness respectively. The layered blocks are visible through shifts in density and tone, but close inspection continues to reveal curved strokes. This is a useful counterpoint to #0: comparable mark-making can appear either dispersed and airy or compressed into something approaching a painted surface.¹⁵

Boundaries that remain visible through disorder

Tan's program makes limitation productive. A line acquires its character through successive choices, while the arrangement of regions determines what those choices can collectively reveal. The boundary is not merely a frame added after drawing. It enters the selection of the drawing's points. The inspected outputs show the effect at two distances: individual curves preserve an appearance of hesitation, while larger concentrations establish recognizable structure.⁴

His development account also records a late problem with outputs differing across platforms and help from the Art Blocks team before release. That history reinforces why the executable drawing and its current runtime deserve attention alongside the still image.⁶ The optional parallax makes the layered construction available to perception, but does not replace the quieter experience of inspecting its densely interwoven lines. Scribbled Boundaries sustains both readings because the same work can be encountered as a mass, a field of gestures and a stack of separately positioned drawings.

Unresolved research questions remain:

• What purpose did the August 9 first token serve, and were any reserve allocations made?
• Do historical price-change events and mint payments exactly match the announced schedule?
• Which recipient transfers substantiate the reported 222 ETH charitable contribution?
• What was the precise pre-release platform discrepancy, and which revision corrected it?
• Is there a separate artist-code licence or project-specific clarification of persistent public display under NIFTY?
• How do viewport-dependent transparency, pointer input and graphics scaling behave across current devices?