# Sentience by pxlq

*Art Blocks Playground, project 20 · 144 outputs · minted 16 February 2021 · NFT License*

![Sentience #133: pale lavender, dusty tan, pink and cornflower-blue vertical bars in separate clusters on a light grey ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000133.png)
*Sentience #133, Budapest palette with the Cross cursor, held by AB5D. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## The work and its context

Sentience is project 20 on the Art Blocks contract `0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270`. The index records 144 invocations against a maximum of 144, the runtime `p5@1.0.0`, a square aspect ratio, a price field of 0.15 ETH and the licence label "NFT License" with no link [^S01]. Its whole description is one question: "What does self-aware art look like?" [^S01][^S02].

Each output is a 25 by 25 grid of cells on a flat ground. Live cells stack into rounded vertical bars and gather into clusters, and every connected cluster takes a single colour. The static image is only half the work. When a viewer's pointer moves over a cluster, the whole connected shape changes to one hidden "main" colour, and it changes back when the pointer leaves. Clicking plants new cells. That response to being touched is the most literal reading of the title's question [^S01].

Art Blocks now files the project under Playground, which it describes as a space, "established in February 2021", for "previously Curated artists to experiment and innovate further" [^S03]. The collection page also lists it in the Art Blocks 500 [^S02]. pxlq fits the Playground description. The index lists an earlier Curated project by pxlq, Dynamic Slices (project 4, December 2020), and a Playground project, Cyber Cities (project 14), activated eight days before Sentience [^S04].

The work at the head of this essay, #133, is AB5D's. It uses the Budapest palette on the Silver ground. Its 233 live cells fall into 12 clusters: a lavender mass on the left, a tan staircase of bars on the right, a pink block at lower left and small cornflower-blue fragments. Its hidden main colour is the lavender (computed) [^S01]. The Art Blocks marketplace gives its traits as Colors 4, Cursor Cross, Palette Budapest and Background Silver [^S05].

## Conception and development

No artist statement, interview or development record for Sentience itself was found, and the earlier AB5D essay also found none [^S06]. The Art Blocks artist page describes pxlq as "a generative artist and creative coder who experiments with a range of abstract styles". It lists OpenSea, Art Blocks, BlockArt, Beyond NFT, VIV3 and Rarible as platforms, and links to pxlq.art and the X account @pxlqart [^S07]. The website itself carries no text about the work; when read, it showed only the question "What device are you using???" [^S08].

OpenSea's "Spotlight" feature of 29 January 2021 profiled pxlq a little over two weeks before the release. There pxlq gives a tagline, "write code // make cool shit", and describes the practice as abstract stills, animations and interactive art made by creative coding. pxlq adds: "Really I'm just trying to see what are the limits of digital art and how can I push those boundaries" [^S09]. The feature gives the X handle as @pxlqqq and links an OpenSea collection, PQ4K [^S09].

In August 2021 the community writer Druid called pxlq an Art Blocks artist and moderator, and credited pxlq with announcing an open-source effort to recreate projects from on-chain data [^S10]. That effort is the MIT-licensed `node-artblocks` package, now under the Art Blocks GitHub organisation [^S11].

The programs show where Sentience came from. All four of pxlq's solo scripts in the index use the same helper names for random numbers, and Sentience inherits its palettes from the two projects before it (code reading) [^S04][^S01]:

- **From Dynamic Slices (project 4):** the palettes published as Moonrise, Budapest, Rushmore, Invaders and Frost, and both colours of Dearth, though not as a pair. The index describes Dynamic Slices as "an on-chain experiment with interactive abstract art", and it reads the pointer position [^S04].
- **From Cyber Cities (project 14):** Royalty, Bleed, Punk and Neon, in the same order and with the same repeated entries (see quirk 4) [^S04].
- **New in Sentience:** Fairy, Peach, Knight and Aspen, and the two grounds, near-black `#08090A` and the Royal purple `#1B064C` [^S01].

Several of these colours come from the `wesanderson` palette package for R. Budapest is that package's GrandBudapest2, entry for entry. The palette published as Moonrise is its Darjeeling1, and Fairy is its Moonrise3 with one olive removed [^S12][^S01]. The trait names therefore do not always match the palettes they borrow from.

## How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 5,591 bytes, SHA-256 `c52d9aecdadb3217a5e805262059a8e274e4de3e2ca3546bb69a5e730b3a3f3b`. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full. No code is reproduced here [^S01]. To test the claims below, the script was run headlessly in Node for all 144 hashes, with p5's drawing calls stubbed out and its version 1.0.0 noise function reproduced. The reconstruction matches all four published traits for every token, and its layouts match the Art Blocks renders of the tokens pictured here [^S01].

**Randomness.** The seed is the first sixteen characters of the hash, "0x" included. A xorshift generator then draws every value, each rounded to one of a thousand steps. It draws, in order, a noise scale, a noise seed, the palette, the main colour, the cursor shape and a colour for the "wanderer" described below [^S01].

**The grid.** Each cell reads p5's Perlin noise at its position times the noise scale, and starts alive if the value exceeds about 0.51. A single pruning pass then kills any live cell with no live neighbour, treating the edge of the grid as live [^S01]. On average 37 per cent of the 625 cells survive, from 144 in #28 to 420 in #14 (computed) [^S01].

**Drawing.** Each live cell is a rounded square, stretched upwards when the cell above is live, so vertical runs fuse into bars with pill-shaped ends [^S01].

**Colour.** The program walks the grid column by column. The first live cell it meets in each connected cluster draws a random palette colour, and a recursive flood fill spreads that colour through the cluster. Clusters are connected sideways as well as vertically, so neighbouring bars share a colour even though they are drawn apart [^S01].

The four published traits follow directly from the draws. Each draw is uniform, apart from a slight shortfall on the last option of any list (quirk 6).

| Trait | Rule in the code | Published count of 144 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Palette | one of 14, equal weights | Knight 15, Royalty 14, Bleed 13, Frost 12, Aspen 11, Peach 10, Invaders 10, Budapest 10, Fairy 10, Punk 9, Neon 9, Dearth 8, Moonrise 7, Rushmore 6 |
| Background | fixed by palette: purple for Royalty, near-black for five palettes, light grey for eight | Silver 77, Night 53, Royal 14 |
| Colors | number of entries in the palette list | 2: 56, 4: 38, 3: 29, 7: 14, 5: 7 |
| Cursor | one of three pointer shapes | Bar 49, Cross 49, Flat 46 |

*Source: index traits [^S01]; rules by code reading, confirmed by the reconstruction.*

**Interaction.** The Cursor trait sets the shape the pointer switches on while it hovers: Cross lights the cell and its four neighbours, Bar the cells above and below, Flat the cells to either side [^S01]. Those temporary cells join whatever cluster they touch. The cell under the pointer is set to the main colour, and the flood fill lets that colour overwrite any other it reaches, so the touched cluster turns the main colour. Holding the left button makes the cells permanent for the session. For #133, hovering over its top-left cluster raises its lavender cells from 71 to 93 by the second frame, since the change lags one frame behind the pointer (computed) [^S01].

The arrow keys switch the ground and join or separate the bars, B restores the ground, and the space bar releases a round "wanderer" that hops between empty cells. None of this changes the token [^S01][^S06].

## Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 144 tokens, turned up the following. Where a point rests on the code alone, it is marked as a code reading.

1. **The strongest variable is not a trait.** The noise scale, drawn between 0.1 and 0.9, decides whether a work is a few broad masses or a scatter of fragments. It correlates with the number of clusters at 0.94. The 37 tokens with a scale below 0.3 have a median of 5 clusters, and the 37 above 0.7 have a median of 30 (computed) [^S01]. No published trait records it.
2. **Colors counts the list, not the picture.** The picture uses one colour per cluster, so a work with few clusters shows fewer colours than its trait says. In 29 of the 144 tokens at least one palette colour never appears. Nine are a single colour, among them #14, whose Colors value is 5 (computed) [^S01].
3. **Monochromes.** Five tokens are one continuous cluster: #14, #37, #63, #68 and #97. Four more have several clusters that all drew the same colour: #94, #108, #116 and #140 (computed) [^S01].
4. **Duplicated colours, inherited.** Royalty lists one blue twice, and Bleed one red twice. Royalty's Colors value is 7 but it has six distinct colours; Bleed's is 3 but it has two. The duplicates also double those colours' chances of being picked [^S01]. Both lists appear the same way in Cyber Cities, so the repetition was carried over (code reading) [^S04].
5. **No isolated cells, ever.** The pruning pass guarantees that every cluster has at least two cells. A lone dot only appears when a viewer makes one (computed) [^S01].
6. **A seed made of eight characters.** The generator's first steps work on 32-bit integers, so only the 7th to 14th hex characters of the hash affect the output. For 85 tokens, JavaScript's number precision also rounds the lowest bits of the seed. The array picker scales by 0.99 before rounding down, so the last entry of any list comes up about 62 times in 1,000 against about 72 for the others. Aspen, the last palette, is the one affected (code reading) [^S01].
7. **Horizontal joins that were never drawn.** The program works out whether each cell has live neighbours to its left and right, then never uses the result. Only vertical joins are drawn, which is why every work reads as vertical bars and not as blobs (code reading) [^S01].
8. **The wanderer's hop.** The wanderer's move sits inside the loop over its neighbours, so it can hop several times in one step. It uses p5's unseeded random function, so its path differs on every viewing (code reading) [^S01].
9. **Stray globals.** Several calls write values with "=" inside the argument list, creating globals named `b`, `w`, `bd` and `color`. The last replaces p5's own `color()` function, as in the Chromie Squiggle. None of this changes the picture (code reading) [^S01].
10. **Stable still frames.** Two successive frames without a pointer produced identical drawing calls for all 144 tokens, so the render and the live piece agree until someone touches it (computed) [^S01].

## The most coveted variants

No auction results or collector commentary were found, so the market record below comes from the chain. Each indexed transfer was matched to its transaction, taking the ETH sent, or the WETH paid for accepted offers, as the price, and leaving out bundles. That gives 159 single-token sales totalling about 300 ETH, touching 82 of the 144 tokens (computed) [^S01][^S13].

**Royalty.** The two highest recorded prices are both for Royalty, the palette with its own purple ground. #10 sold for 12.5 ETH on OpenSea on 27 August 2021, and #65 for 10.0 ETH on 23 August 2021 [^S13][^S14]. #10 had first been resold for 3.0 ETH 72 minutes after its mint, the highest mint-day resale; the next was 1.0 ETH for #135 (computed) [^S13].

![Sentience #10: cyan, blue, violet and magenta bars in many clusters on a deep purple ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000010.png)
*#10, Royalty, sold for 12.5 ETH in August 2021. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The same buyer, five minutes apart.** The wallet that bought #10 had paid 12.0 ETH for #138, a Peach work in hot pink with a few pale fragments, five minutes earlier. It still held both at retrieval [^S13][^S01]. No source inspected names its owner.

![Sentience #138: a large hot-pink mass of vertical bars with small pale pink clusters on a light grey ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000138.png)
*#138, Peach, sold for 12.0 ETH on 27 August 2021. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The extremes.** In the same week #28, the work with the fewest live cells, sold for 7.9 ETH, and #29, the most fragmented with 37 clusters, for 6.5 ETH and then 8.0 ETH a day later. #2, a Rushmore, one of the rarest palettes, sold for 8.0 ETH [^S13]. #29's later sales show how the moment passed: 4.75 ETH in September, 1.78 ETH in October, and 0.79 and 1.46 ETH in two sales on 29 November 2021 (computed) [^S13].

![Sentience #29: many short charcoal and pink-red bars scattered across a light grey ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000029.png)
*#29, 37 clusters. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The monochromes.** #14 is the extreme case. It has the lowest possible noise scale, 0.1, and the most live cells, 420: one orange cluster from the Moonrise palette, whose listed Colors value is 5 [^S01]. It has never sold for a recorded price (computed) [^S13].

![Sentience #14: a single orange mass of vertical bars filling most of a light grey square](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000014.png)
*#14, one cluster of 420 cells. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The near-invisible.** Dearth pairs a dark slate blue with a lime green on the near-black ground. #37 is a single slate-blue cluster, so its 386 cells barely separate from the ground [^S01]. It sold for about 0.11 WETH in March 2024 and about 0.22 WETH in January 2026 (computed) [^S13].

![Sentience #37: dark slate-blue bars on an almost black ground, barely visible](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000037.png)
*#37, Dearth. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Invocation 0.** #0 is Frost, cream and silver-grey bars on the near-black ground. It is held by the artist address (see The mint) [^S01].

![Sentience #0: cream and silver-grey bars in clusters on a near-black ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000000.png)
*#0, Frost, held by the artist address. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## Notable collectors

At retrieval the 144 tokens were held by 84 addresses, 58 of them holding one each [^S01]. Art Blocks user profiles, which holders fill in themselves, name several of the larger ones [^S15]:

- **Snowfro.** The address holding seven, #15 to #18, #110, #119 and #128, has a profile named Snowfro, linked to the X account @artonblockchain. It received all seven on 31 July 2021 [^S15][^S01].
- **Jonas Lamis.** The profile of that name holds six, #41, #42, #43, #59, #62 and the monochrome #68. All six arrived from one address on 29 January 2023 [^S15][^S01].
- **ddaavvee.** This profile also holds seven, including #1 and the monochrome #14 [^S15][^S01].
- **pxlq** holds #0, and **AB5D** holds #133 [^S15][^S01].

Profile names are self-declared and unchecked. The other seven-token address and the #10 and #138 wallet have no profile, and no source inspected names them [^S01].

**The provenance of #133.** #133 was minted on 16 February 2021 and moved in March 2021 together with #126. From August 2022 it was one of eight Sentiences held together, and in October 2022 that group moved to a single address. On 27 September 2025 #133 alone was bought from that address for 0.15 ETH through Seaport, and passed to an AB5D wallet about four and a half hours later. The other seven went to one address in December 2025, the third wallet in the index with seven [^S01][^S13][^S16].

## The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 15 February 2021 at 20:59:06 UTC, before the project's recorded activation at 23:16:18 [^S01]. It went not to the artist address but to another address, which passed it to the artist address on 7 November 2021 [^S01]. The public sale opened at 00:30:37 UTC on 16 February, and #1 was minted in that same second. Ten tokens were minted within two minutes, 42 within ten and 95 within thirty. The final two, #142 and #143, came together at 01:21:47, 51 minutes after the opening [^S01].

All 144 mint transactions, #0 included, sent exactly 0.15 ETH to the same minter contract, which confirms the indexed price (computed) [^S13]. Cyber Cities is indexed at the same price, Dynamic Slices at 0.05 ETH and the later Hieroglyphs at 0.1 ETH [^S01][^S04]. Resale began at once: 35 single-token sales in February 2021, with a median of 0.95 ETH. The median sale stood at about 4.4 ETH in August 2021 and 4.5 ETH in September, and since 2024 no recorded single-token sale has exceeded 0.3 ETH (computed) [^S13]. The lowest listing at retrieval was 0.72 ETH [^S01][^S02].

## Copyright and licensing

The index records the label "NFT License" without a link or version, and the script carries no licence notice [^S01]. The terms of the artwork are therefore unconfirmed. p5.js is supplied at view time under its own open-source licence, and `node-artblocks` is MIT-licensed; neither governs the artwork [^S06][^S11].

## Significance and limitations

Sentience is an early interactive work on Art Blocks, preceded by pxlq's own Dynamic Slices [^S04]. It puts the question of its title into its code: each work is still until touched, then pulls a whole connected shape into one colour [^S01]. Reading the code against every token shows that the published traits describe the work only partly. The variable that most shapes the picture, the noise scale, is unrecorded, and the Colors trait counts list entries, not visible colours [^S01].

Its market life follows the Art Blocks cycle closely: a sell-out in 51 minutes, a spike in late August 2021 when Royalty works reached 10 to 12.5 ETH, and a long decline since [^S13]. Outside the chain the evidence is thin. No statement about Sentience, exhibition, physical work, auction or press coverage was found, and the artist is known only by a pseudonym.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What did pxlq intend by "self-aware"? The X accounts @pxlqart and @pxlqqq could not be read. The Spotlight quotations and the Art Blocks biography were read through automated WebFetch extraction and should be checked against the pages.
2. Why did Royalty, #28, #29 and #2 lead the August 2021 sales? The prices are on-chain (computed here through public archive nodes, and checked on Etherscan for #10 and #133), but no commentary explains them.
3. Do the Snowfro and Jonas Lamis profiles belong to the people they name, and who controls the unnamed seven-token address and the #10 and #138 wallet?
4. Did the render service and marketplaces ever expose the interaction, and does it still run in current Art Blocks viewers?
5. What are the terms behind the "NFT License" label for this project?

## Bibliography

### Primary

[^S01]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `projects_metadata` for project 20 (including the full program), `tokens_metadata` for all 144 tokens and `transfers_metadata` for all 469 transfers. Retrieved 20 to 21 September 2026 via https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql. Figures marked as computed come from running that program headlessly for every hash, or from the transfer records (AB5D working files).
[^S04]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `projects_metadata` for projects 4 (Dynamic Slices), 14 (Cyber Cities) and 30 (Hieroglyphs), all by pxlq, including their programs. Retrieved 20 September 2026.
[^S15]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `users` and `user_profiles` for the 84 holding addresses (self-declared display names, usernames and X handles). Retrieved 21 September 2026.
[^S13]: Ethereum mainnet transactions behind every Sentience transfer and mint, read on 21 September 2026 through public archive nodes (eth.drpc.org, eth.merkle.io, rpc.mevblocker.io and others) as a data API. Prices are ETH value or summed WETH transfers per transaction; bundles and multi-NFT transactions excluded. AB5D working files.
[^S14]: Etherscan, transaction 0xd44555d6…685d4c, OpenSea Wyvern v1, 12.5 ETH, Art Blocks token 20000010, 27 August 2021. Read 21 September 2026. https://etherscan.io/tx/0xd44555d6632f8006c36d7598bc3a45989c5d911190eba4c49d52ee00e6685d4c
[^S16]: Etherscan, transaction 0x7baf3c8a…c362, Seaport 1.6, 0.15 ETH, Art Blocks token 20000133, 27 September 2025. Read 21 September 2026. https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7baf3c8a15dffd68912dfc75b0d997a2c1fce29c35d489c6b6fed166f827c362
[^S02]: Art Blocks, "Sentience by pxlq" collection page. Read 20 and 21 September 2026. https://www.artblocks.io/collection/sentience-by-pxlq and https://www.artblocks.io/collections/presents/projects/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20
[^S07]: Art Blocks, artist page "pxlq". Read 21 September 2026. https://www.artblocks.io/artists/pxlq
[^S08]: pxlq, website. Read 21 September 2026. https://pxlq.art/
[^S03]: Art Blocks, "Playground". https://www.artblocks.io/discover/playground
[^S05]: Art Blocks marketplace, "Sentience #133". Read 20 September 2026. https://www.artblocks.io/marketplace/asset/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000133
[^S11]: Art Blocks, `node-artblocks`, GitHub. https://github.com/ArtBlocks/node-artblocks
[^S12]: Karthik Ram, `wesanderson` R package, palette definitions. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karthik/wesanderson/master/R/colors.R

### Video and audio

No video, podcast or recorded talk about Sentience or by pxlq was found in searches on 21 September 2026. pxlq's X accounts (https://x.com/pxlqart, and @pxlqqq as given by OpenSea) could not be read.

### Criticism, collecting and market

[^S06]: AB5D, "Sentience", earlier essay. Read 20 September 2026. https://ab5d.xyz/series/sentience-by-pxlq/
[^S09]: OpenSea Crew, "Spotlight, January 2021", OpenSea blog, 29 January 2021. https://opensea.io/blog/articles/spotlight-january-2021
[^S10]: Druid, "How 'On-Chain' is Art Blocks?", The Link (Medium), 18 August 2021. https://medium.com/the-link-art-blocks/how-on-chain-is-art-blocks-5ccd553dd370

### Further reading

- OpenSea, "Sentience by pxlq" collection page, with current listings. https://opensea.io/collection/sentience-by-pxlq
- OpenSea, "Sentience #10". https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/20000010
- AB5D, "Space Debris [ravaged] by WhaleStreet x pxlq", which uses the same random-number helpers. https://ab5d.xyz/series/space-debris-ravaged-by-whalestreet-x-pxlq/
- OpenSea, "Dynamic Slices #0". https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/4000000