send/receive

The work and its context

send/receive is project 5 on the Art Blocks V2 core contract 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070, published under the canonical slug sendreceive-by-snowfro and credited to Snowfro. The indexed project record reports a completed edition of 8983 of 10000 invocations, runtime custom@na, and the official description: send/receive is a conceptual artwork that celebrates the digital art community and the technology that connects us. It is a fully on-chain, highly participatory system in which every collector becomes a co-creator contributing their presence, energy, and intention to a network of interdependent artworks running on Ethereum. Each artwork is alive to the global state of the network. Block by block, the balance between "sending" and "receiving" across all tokens determines what each piece displays. As collectors change their settings, the entire network shifts in real time. Collectors begin by creating a 64×64 pixel character, a personal sprite, to represent themselves on the network. Optionally, they can compose a simple four-track audio tune to accompany their sprite. This can be done through the Art Blocks interface, which records and submits the creation directly to the blockchain, or through the fully on-chain editors embedded in the artwork itself, allowing collectors to generate a data string and manually update their token via Etherscan. By default, each token starts in a neutral state. If a sprite has been added, the artwork displays it as a static image. From there, collectors choose how they want to participate: send, receive, or both. These choices shape the global system. When more tokens are sending, the receiving tokens display incoming sprites more rapidly. When more tokens choose to receive, the senders are distributed across the network at a slower pace. Each token expresses its role visually: * Receive mode: a continuous flow of incoming sprites, presented in one of four styles assigned at mint (grid, column, fall, or bounce). * Send mode: your sprite remains centered, occasionally pulsing outward as it broadcasts. * Send + Receive: your token displays its receive style with a subtle pulsing border to indicate that it is also sending. Collectors are invited to adjust their token's setting as their mood changes to give, to take, or to hold both impulses at once. The more you take, the less others receive. The less you take, the more others receive. The system reflects these choices instantly, on-chain, creating an ever-shifting portrait of community intention. The project was inspired by how people in our community often say "sending thoughts and prayers" to express support, or "send your thoughts and prayers" when they need encouragement. As someone who is not religious, I wanted to explore the underlying sentiment without invoking prayer directly to create a way for us to express care, attention, and presence through the medium of networked art. Empathy is the foundation of this work. In a world that increasingly questions its value, I believe empathy is essential not only for navigating our digital lives, but for understanding each other at all. Taking a moment to step into someone else's shoes can illuminate motivations, reduce friction, and help us meet each other with generosity. send/receive is an experiment in using on-chain art to make that exchange visible, felt, and shared. ¹²

Those figures are current index observations retrieved on 2026-09-19, not a reconstruction of the original public sale announcement. Atlas position is a catalogue ordinal and is not the on-chain project ID. The live collection page and the Hasura projects_metadata row agree on title, slug, contract, and project ID after a filtered query that used the exact slug. ¹²

Contract 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070. Aspect ratio indexed as 1.0. Website none indexed.

This essay treats the stored artist program, four independently identified outputs, and a freshly checked AB5D holding (or an explicit collection gap) as primary evidence. Metadata traits are cited only when they were returned for the same V2 contract token IDs that were visually inspected. They do not replace looking at the pictures. ³⁴

Conception and development

The official project description is the development account used here. Interview or dossier sentences that name a different slug are not treated as statements about this series. send/receive is a conceptual artwork that celebrates the digital art community and the technology that connects us. It is a fully on-chain, highly participatory system in which every collector becomes a co-creator contributing their presence, energy, and intention to a network of interdependent artworks running on Ethereum. Each artwork is alive to the global state of the network. Block by bloc

The development account used here is the specific source named in the citations, not a paraphrase of an artist-dossier page. Where that account is an official project description written in the artist's voice, that limit is stated rather than upgraded into an unpublished studio diary. Where an interview exists, the sentences that actually name send/receive are the ones relied on. ⁵¹

Secondary pages that only repeat the marketplace listing are not treated as independent conception sources. ²⁵

How the work was constructed

The complete artist program for slug sendreceive-by-snowfro was retrieved from projects_metadata.script filtered by that exact slug. The UTF-8 payload is 700000 bytes with SHA-256 b6616211c86c9b0b38f08424c29ef29da83a170af63682c05cc4d45faeb06b43. Runtime on the project record is custom@na. The script was read in full; it was not executed in this research session. ⁶

The stored generator is 700000 bytes, SHA-256 b6616211c86c9b0b38f08424c29ef29da83a170af63682c05cc4d45faeb06b43, runtime custom@na. Detected source markers: setup, draw, createCanvas, keydown, requestAnimationFrame, AudioContext, tokenData, hash. Named functions include addCell, applyRectangleSelection, applyStepPattern, arraysEqual, beginRectangleSelection, buildGridPatternFromState, buildUI, bytesToHex, changeGridSize, changePatternLength. tokenData.hash is read in source. Output then follows the drawing path those functions implement. Token 0 observation: Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x2400px, dark and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 6,12,9). File size 22822 bytes. Indexed features: Send State Sending; Send Style Shimmer; Receive State Receiving; Receive Style Column

Visual claims come from inspected media-proxy PNGs plus indexed token features.

Seed handling is visible in the retrieved program: tokenData.hash is read in source. Time and interaction behaviour in code is: Source contains a continuing-draw or audio/WebGL constructor. The inspected PNG is one frame. Live timing and soundtrack were not captured this session. A handler found in source is not the same thing as a control that was pressed in a live renderer during this session; tested controls are listed only when an actual key or pointer action was performed. ⁶⁷

External dependencies are those declared by script_type_and_version plus any library identifiers inside the file. Public visibility of the stored script does not grant a right to redistribute the raw artist source in this package, so the analysis cites functions and byte length rather than reprinting the program. ⁶⁸

The mint

Indexed chronology for project 5 on 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070 is as follows. First token minted_at is 2025-11-27T16:12:11+00:00. activated_at is 2025-11-27T16:25:59+00:00. start_datetime is 2025-12-15T17:00:00+00:00. completed_at is None. Invocations stand at 8983 of a maximum 10000, with complete=true on the retrieved row. ²³

Calculated intervals from those timestamps: first mint to activation is 13.8 minutes; activation to start_datetime is 18.02 days; start_datetime to completion is an interval that cannot be calculated from the retrieved timestamps; first mint to completion is an interval that cannot be calculated from the retrieved timestamps. These are differences of indexed clock fields, not a claim about when a web storefront button became visible to every collector. A first mint that precedes start_datetime is treated as an early or reserved mint unless a separate allocation record is produced. ²³

Indexed clocks: first 2025-11-27T16:12:11+00:00, activated 2025-11-27T16:25:59+00:00, start 2025-12-15T17:00:00+00:00, completed None. Early first-mint timestamps are not labelled reserved without a separate allocation record.

Historic per-token ETH prices for the original public sale were not recovered from a primary price table during this session and remain unresolved. Any floor price visible on a marketplace page in 2026 is a current listing observation, not the 2021 ask. ¹²

Copyright and licensing

The project record stores the artwork licence label 'unknown'. That label is not a Creative Commons version string and is recorded as a custom or unknown artwork term. Code rights for the artist program are not separately labelled on the same field; they are treated as unknown rather than assumed identical to the artwork deed. ²⁸

Artwork label copied exactly as None.

Third-party runtime custom@na is a separate rights object from both the artwork outputs and the artist source. p5.js, three.js, and ordinary browser JavaScript each keep their own licence texts. This package does not redistribute those libraries. ⁶⁸

Original essay prose in this package is dedicated CC0-1.0 by the research operator. That dedication does not change the artwork, code, or dependency licences.

Close reading of examples

send/receive #0 is token 5000000 on 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070, minted 2025-11-27T16:12:11+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x2400px, dark and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 6,12,9). File size 22822 bytes. Indexed features: Send State Sending; Send Style Shimmer; Receive State Receiving; Receive Style Column Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Send State Sending; Send Style Shimmer; Receive State Receiving; Receive Style Column. ³⁹⁴

send/receive #1 is token 5000001 on 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070, minted 2025-12-15T14:20:11+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x2400px, dark and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 21,14,7). File size 24795 bytes. Indexed features: Send State Sending; Send Style Glitch; Receive State Receiving; Receive Style Fall Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Send State Sending; Send Style Glitch; Receive State Receiving; Receive Style Fall. ³⁹⁴

send/receive #10 is token 5000010 on 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070, minted 2025-12-15T14:20:11+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x2400px, dark and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 23,23,17). File size 126478 bytes. Indexed features: Send State Neutral; Send Style Shimmer; Receive State Neutral; Receive Style Grid Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Send State Neutral; Send Style Shimmer; Receive State Neutral; Receive Style Grid. ³⁹⁴

send/receive #20 is token 5000020 on 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070, minted 2025-12-15T14:20:11+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x2400px, dark and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 19,19,19). File size 124949 bytes. Indexed features: Send State Neutral; Send Style Contour; Receive State Neutral; Receive Style Column Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Send State Neutral; Send Style Contour; Receive State Neutral; Receive Style Column. ³⁹⁴

The AB5D header candidate is token 5000358 (edition 358), currently indexed to 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045, which is one of the three linked addresses returned for username ab5d on 2026-09-19. That ownership match is a present-tense index observation, not proof of continuous custody since mint. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 2400x2400px, dark and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 16,11,11). File size 24976 bytes. Indexed features: Send State Sending; Send Style Glitch; Receive State Receiving; Receive Style Bounce ¹⁰³⁴

Motion, interaction, and audio: Source contains a continuing-draw or audio/WebGL constructor. The inspected PNG is one frame. Live timing and soundtrack were not captured this session. The static PNGs document halt or preview states. They are not by themselves proof that a live loop is still running, nor proof that a work is silent. No soundtrack was heard from these pages during this session. ⁴⁷⁶

Significance and limitations

send/receive is project 5 by Snowfro on 0xababababab20053426ad1c782de9ea8444358070. The close readings above are the evidence for what the stored program outputs.

Unresolved research questions that remain after this pass: (1) What was the exact public-sale unit price in ETH at start_datetime, supported by a contemporaneous primary source rather than a later floor? (2) For tokens whose live renderer was not stopwatch-timed, what is the measured wall-clock period of one full cycle or one completed progressive draw? (3) What contemporaneous primary source records the original public unit price in ETH? (4) Incomplete Control aside, do any of the three current AB5D wallets later acquire or dispose of the header token used above after 2026-09-19? ²¹⁰⁷

This package is a draft for human review. Structural validation tests file shape, not the truth of seeing or of licence interpretation.