Skulptuur

The work and its context

Skulptuur is a 1,000-edition Art Blocks Curated series by Piter Pasma on the V2 core contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The official collection page places it in Art Blocks 500 / Curated and prints a fixed edition of 1,000 unique artworks.¹ Indexed project metadata retrieved on 18 September 2026 records project ID 173, slug skulptuur-by-piter-pasma, script type js@na, license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, vertical name curated, heritage status ab500, website https://piterpasma.nl/skulptuur, and 1,000 of 1,000 invocations.² Atlas position 166 is an index number, not the contract project ID.

The stored project description calls the series an exploration in generating forms in three-dimensional space, sculptures "carved from a sea of infinite possibilities, much like a sculptor creates a singular reality from the potential in a block of stone." It claims the code is reduced to 6370 bytes, that Skulptuurs render in real time, that live view keeps improving in quality, and that keys 0-7 change speed (0=Stop, 5=Default, 7=Fastest). It warns that the work needs a powerful machine and a WebGL2-enabled browser.¹²

Piter Pasma's project page at piterpasma.nl/skulptuur restates that carving metaphor and adds tiled-rendering notes plus a link to an Art Blocks conversation on Cent.³ The AB5D dossier is a bibliography lead.⁴ This essay uses the on-chain description, the studio page, the indexed script, and inspected outputs.

Conception and development

The conception documents that can be pinned to this slug are the Art Blocks project description and the studio page at piterpasma.nl/skulptuur.¹³ Both use the stone-carving analogy. The studio page adds that two grid sizes are selected with shapes that may be solid, hollow, or double shelled, that those grids are intersected so only common space remains, and that color and material are linked to form. It also states that keys 6 or 7 speed the render on powerful machines, that 0 stops it, and that Safari may need a WebGL2 flag. Tiled rendering uses a #M;N URL fragment.³

A Cent conversation titled "In Conversation with Piter Pasma" is linked from that studio page and from the assignment snapshot. The live Cent URL returned limited body text to this pass; it is recorded as a lead rather than as a fully quoted interview transcript.⁵ Claims about artistic intention that appear only in secondary summaries are not treated as primary testimony.

Published token features name gold, grid0, grid1, shift, shape0, shape1, shells0, shells1, camera_pos, shape_name, environ_name, environ_type, camera_height, env_shadows_type, and skulptuur_height. Sampled environments include Video Game Violets and Complimentary Dessert. Shape names compound two grids, for example "3x3 zdiscs-ii / 4x4 bal-ii."⁶ Those labels should be checked against stills rather than treated as museum wall texts.

The 6370-byte claim in the project description matches the retrieved script length exactly.¹⁶ That match is a length check, not a proof that every byte is original or that the live generator uses this exact body without a wrapper. The Art Blocks generator shell still injects tokenData and hosts WebGL. Pasma's "less than half a page of symbols" remark on the studio page is commentary on that density, not an additional specification of the hash-to-form map.³

How the work was constructed

The indexed record reports script type and version js@na.² The full script was retrieved on 18 September 2026 from projects_metadata.script on https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql, filtered by contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project_id "173". The UTF-8 payload is 6370 bytes. SHA-256 of those exact bytes is b10288da515355bfa930c3637b53947fdf9b9a6f46723ea487219e6092e3e758. The script was read in full and was not executed in a local sandbox.⁶

The body is densely minified. It seeds a Uint32Array xorshift generator R from slices of tokenData.hash. Grid-pair tables O and camera or material registers follow. WEBGL appears as a string in the body. There is no p5 createCanvas and no named draw. Real-time improvement described on the project page is consistent with a progressive WebGL renderer rather than a single blit. Keys 0-7 are documented on the collection page; this essay does not claim a measured frames-per-second change because those keys were not typed against a running generator in this pass.¹⁶

No Tone.js or Web Audio API appears in the inspected bytes. What is stored on chain is the project script plus each token hash. Rendering still requires a WebGL2 browser and the generator shell that injects tokenData. The project record marks the script locked. No Ethereum block was pinned.²

The mint

Several clocks have to be kept apart. Token 173000000, invocation 0, was minted on 24 September 2021 at 00:01:58 and is currently owned by 0x9546c0f8260cc1560a0db625ea4eec1a823866ac.⁶ The project record's activated_at is 24 September 2021 at 13:14:49. start_datetime is 27 September 2021 at 16:00:00.² Invocation 1 (token 173000001) was minted on 27 September 2021 at 16:03:39. Invocations 10, 20 and 108 followed at 16:20:56, 16:21:40 and 16:23:54 the same day. completed_at is 27 September 2021 at 16:29:09.²⁶

Invocation 0 therefore predates activation by about thirteen hours and public start by three days. It is the natural candidate for an artist or administrative mint; contract event logs that would prove the minter role were not pulled. Public minting evidence in this sample begins with invocation 1, three minutes thirty-nine seconds after start. Invocations 10 through 108 in this sample all fall inside a four-minute window after 16:20, which is consistent with a fast public queue but is not by itself a complete mint-by-mint reconstruction. From start to completed_at is 29 minutes 9 seconds. That span covers the remaining 999 tokens only if no pause occurred and if start equaled purchaser availability. This essay does not convert that span into a sold-out-in-minutes claim.

Invocations and max_invocations both read 1,000 on 18 September 2026.² The collection page confirms the completed fixed edition.¹ No Dutch-auction schedule or opening ETH price was recovered from the collection page or the indexed project record.⁷

Copyright and licensing

The project metadata field license is the exact string CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. No separate link_to_license field was stored on the indexed record inspected for this essay.² The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International deed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ permits sharing with attribution, forbids commercial use as defined in that deed, and forbids derivative works.⁸ Whether the artist intended that standard deed or only the short label is not documented in a project-specific instrument beyond the Art Blocks field. ND is stricter than the BY-NC labels used on several Factory series in this batch; the difference is recorded rather than smoothed.

Artwork rights are separate from source-code rights. The artist script is visible through the index and generator. Visibility is not a license to copy or reissue the program. No SPDX header was present in the inspected body.⁶ The runtime is raw browser JavaScript plus WebGL2; those dependencies are not relicensed by the artwork label.²

AB5D's CC0 grant covers this essay's original prose only. Token ownership does not transfer copyright in the images.

Close reading of examples

Four tokens from the assignment discovery set were confirmed on the V2 contract and inspected as media-proxy PNGs with linked generator URLs: invocations 0, 1, 10 and 20. Invocation 108, owned by 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045 on 18 September 2026, is the header object.⁶⁹¹⁰ Live speed keys were not tested. PNGs are progressive-render captures, not proofs that quality has finished improving.

Edition 0 (token 173000000) is a pale studio photograph: a dark bowl or pedestal with a white rim, a glossy chain of linked tubular forms stacked in gray, black, and copper highlight, and a soft gray cyclorama. The sculpture reads as jewelry-scale rather than monumental. Gold=no in later sampled traits; this still is likewise not a gilt object.⁶¹¹

Edition 1 (token 173000001) continues the same language of interpenetrating shells under colored light, confirmed on-contract and downloaded. Edition 10 carries gold=no, grid0=3x3 / shape0=zdiscs, grid1=4x4 / shape1=bal, double shells, environ_name=Video Game Violets, environ_type=shadows, camera_height=ground, skulptuur_height=10.1. Edition 20 was likewise confirmed. Header edition 108 is 4x3 ydiscs-ii / 4x4 xdon-ii, environ_name=Complimentary Dessert, environ_type=clouds, camera_height=medium low, skulptuur_height=10.1. The header still keeps the pedestal-and-shell grammar; Complimentary Dessert is a lighting name, not a visible slice of cake.⁶¹¹

Canonical token URLs use the chain/contract/id pattern. Displayed edition numbers are invocations.

Significance and limitations

Skulptuur is a locked Curated edition that treats a 6370-byte WebGL2 program as a block of stone and sells one carving per hash. The stored brief and the studio page agree on intersection of two grids, progressive live quality, and numbered speed keys.¹³ The retrieved byte count matches the advertised 6370. The 29-minute window from start_datetime to completed_at is a pair of indexed clocks, not a reconstructed sales narrative.²⁶

Limits of this account are specific. Live keys 0-7 were not performed in the submitted research. Invocation 0's minter role was not read from logs. Individual token prices were not recovered.⁷ The Cent conversation was a lead, not a fully extracted transcript.⁵ Before publication, the coordinator refreshed the complete three-wallet AB5D linked-account set and checked the chosen token owner against it. The owner matched. The exact requests, returned identity and observation time are retained in the evidence record, separately from the earlier research snapshot. This is current indexed ownership evidence; it does not establish the acquisition date or historical custody of the work.²¹⁰

Unresolved questions - What ETH price did each sampled token pay at primary sale? - Who minted token 173000000 on 24 September 2021, and under what project role? - How many progressive passes does a default-speed live view need before the PNG matches the media-proxy still? - What additional claims in the Cent conversation are not on piterpasma.nl/skulptuur? - Does gold=yes produce a distinct metal response, and how rare is that trait?