Scribblines

The work and its context

Scribblines is a 256-edition generative art series by Orpheusk, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 335, through Art Blocks Factory, with heritage placement in the AB500 set.¹² Each output is a single obsessive drawing: hundreds of concentric pen lines tracing around one invisible pivot line until the sheet fills or the shape stops short, in inks from ballpoint blue to multi-color gradients on papers from white to sticky-note yellow.¹³

The description is a tribute: "SCRIBBLINES are a tribute to countless drawings that are being created every day during monotonous meetings and are forever lost in trash. Almost everybody has experienced doodling (or scribbling) at some point in our lives to keep our brains active. The mental state of doodling is between awareness and daydreaming and is known to often inspire creative ideas." The mechanism is stated plainly: "At the core of each piece is a pivot line, created by a random algorithm. This pivot line defines the shape of the entire art piece. Every additional line traces around the pivot line. Computer generated lines allow for perfecting what is never possible in the 'pen and paper world'."¹

The description enumerates the feature axes: Precision, varying "from inaccurate (to simulate hand shaking micro movements) to robotically perfect precision"; Determination, most pieces filling the whole surface while some finish as bulk shapes; Paper, lighter or darker grounds including special sticky-note papers; and Pen, the axis with the most variability.¹ The AB5D dossier frames the project as "programmed gestures at the boundary of drawing and code", testing "how code can evoke the pressure, hesitation, repetition, and irregularity of drawing by hand".² Scribblines is Orpheusk's only work in the AB500 set; the collector-metric rank stands at 213 of 308.² The series runs on p5.js 1.0.0 at a 1.3 landscape aspect ratio with zero external assets, under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.¹

Conception and development

The conception is affectionate salvage: the meeting doodle, normally thrown away, given algorithmic permanence. The artist's own project page extends the description with a citation to the psychologist Jackie Andrade's finding that doodlers remember more than non-doodlers when asked to retain delivered information, grounding the work in the defense of idle drawing.⁴ The page also names the artist's relationship to the form: "'Scribblines' has always been my favorite idle drawing."⁴

The feature list doubles as an artist's statement about simulation. On Precision, the page describes three shaking modes, "Steady hand", "Slight Shaking" and "Intense shaking", the last "simulating less concentrated hand movements", and notes that the shakier lines produce "interesting moire effect".⁴ On Determination, the artist explains the compositional choice: "In a real world environment it is unlikely to find enough time or perseverance to fill in the whole paper surface and finish these drawings. Due to this I chose most of the generated Scribblines to fill the whole screen. However some pieces are set to be finished as a 'bulk' shapes and not fill in the whole piece."¹⁴

The dossier names the resulting tension the coded hand: "Each composition suggests bodily motion, but its gestures are computational constructions."² No project-specific interview exists; the registry interview field is null, so the conception is documented from the description, the artist's site and the dossier.¹²⁴

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 scribblines-by-orpheusk and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 335. The retrieved script is 9,481 bytes, the smallest in this batch, with SHA-256 digest dce5d1983578b4cdf294f56edf7e6216840b5c157efccaddc0c6358f7c44ee9f, and it was read in full.¹⁵

The script runs p5.js 1.0.0 and is only lightly minified: an identifiable class named Random implements the dual-stream sfc32 arrangement seen across this cohort, two generators seeded from the two 32-character halves of the token hash, run through a one-million-pair warmup and alternated on successive calls.⁵ The composition code is feature-driven in exactly the terms the artist describes: an early block draws the paper type with weighted probabilities (a roughly 8% branch, an 11% branch with a positive tilt parameter, a 24% branch with a negative one, and a default), and subsequent draws choose pen behavior and fill determination.¹⁵

The drawing itself is a p5 draw loop that traces successive offset lines around the pivot; in the live renderer at roughly 1000 by 770 pixels the trace completes within the first 1.5 seconds, after which frames are identical.⁵⁶ There are no event listeners and no audio pathways anywhere in the script, and the live page holds zero audio or video elements; the reported hash of token 335000042 matched the chain record exactly.⁵⁶

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows one of the fastest sales in this batch: about eighty-two seconds.¹⁷ Edition 0 was minted on July 18, 2022 at 19:38:17 UTC, and the project was activated on July 22, 2022 at 04:13:09 UTC, the same activation timestamp as Alan Ki Aankhen, its Curated Series 8 neighbour in the registry.¹ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads August 5, 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC; the official collection page carries "Released Aug 5, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC", and the dossier confirms the date as 5 August 2022.¹⁸²

The sale was effectively instantaneous: editions 1, 10, 20 and the AB5D treasury's edition 42 all minted in the same block-minute at 17:00:44 UTC, and the final edition 255 at 17:01:22 UTC, the recorded completion time.¹⁷ The minted count equals the maximum of 256, 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 AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 42, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.⁷⁹

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0" for Scribblines, with the terms URL recorded in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.¹ This is the batch's only ShareAlike licence: the deed grants the freedoms to Share, to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to Adapt, remix, transform and build upon the material, 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 ShareAlike, distributing any adaptations only under the same licence. The deed forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.¹⁰

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.⁵ The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the p5.js 1.0.0 library noted in the script type.¹⁵ Owning a Scribblines 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.⁷

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.⁶³

Edition 42 (token 335000042, minted August 5, 2022 at 17:00:44 UTC, forty-four seconds into the sale), the AB5D-held header, is the unfinished one: a blue ballpoint scribble on white that stops short as a bulk shape, its outermost lines fading to grey at the edges, the Determination feature made visible.¹⁷⁹³ In the live view the trace drew itself out and settled; the page holds no audio and no interactive controls.⁶

Edition 0 (token 335000000, the July 18, 2022 pre-activation mint) is the boldest: black ink on saturated sticky-note yellow, filled edge to edge, the paper feature at its most aggressive.¹⁷³ Edition 1 (token 335000001, the first public mint) is the moire piece: fine blue lines on white with visible handshake wobble where the contours bunch and interfere.⁴⁷³

Edition 10 (token 335000010) shows off the pen axis: a single drawing whose ink shifts from bright green to olive along its length, a multi-color pen on white.¹⁷³ Edition 20 (token 335000020) is the quiet one: blue ink on cream paper, a three-lobed bulk shape with clean margins, the most sheet-of-paper-like of the sample.⁷³ Across the five, the pivot-and-trace grammar is constant; paper, ink, precision and completeness vary.³

Significance and limitations

Scribblines is the batch's smallest program and its most democratic subject: 9,481 bytes of p5.js that dignify the throwaway meeting doodle, sold out in eighty-two seconds.¹⁵⁷ It is also the batch's only ShareAlike licence, so its adaptations are legally bound to stay in the commons.¹¹⁰

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the August 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.¹
• No project-specific interview exists; the registry interview field is null.¹
• The artist is documented only through the project site and the AB5D dossier; no independent biographical sources (location, background, other work) were located in the inspected material.²⁴
• The weighted paper-type branch probabilities visible in the script (about 8%, 11%, 24% and a default) are not documented as feature names in the inspected sources; the mapping from branches to paper labels is inferred from the description and previews.¹⁵³
• The draw loop's progressive trace completes within about 1.5 seconds at the tested viewport; slower machines may show the tracing visibly, but this was not measured.⁶