# SL/CE by Stranger in the Q

*Art Blocks Presents, project 419 · 40 outputs · public release 3 April 2023 · CC BY 4.0*

![SL/CE #37: a dark navy triangle over a red inverted triangle with a circular eye, on a cream ground](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000037.png)
*SL/CE #37, Berry palette, held by AB5D. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## The work and its context

SL/CE (pronounced "slice") is project 419 on the contract `0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069`. The index records 40 invocations against a maximum of 40, the runtime `js@n/a` (plain JavaScript with no library), an aspect ratio of 0.618 and the licence `CC BY 4.0` [^S01]. That contract is Art Blocks' Core V3, which carries projects from 374 onwards [^S02]. The earlier AB5D essay placed the work on the V2 core contract; that was wrong [^S03].

The index files SL/CE in the Presents vertical [^S01], which Art Blocks describes as "established in November 2022 as a successor to the Playground and Factory collections" [^S04]. The project page lists it among the Art Blocks 500, the closed set Art Blocks treats as its foundational era [^S05][^S06].

The artist's mint text says the work "explores Suprematism and generative composition, attempts to fill some gap between generated and constructed artworks" [^S01]. Each output is a tall golden-ratio panel on which a few flat shapes, cut into pieces, float on a single coloured ground. The loose figure that results often resembles a face or a profile, which the artist welcomes [^S01].

## Conception and development

Stranger in the Q is the working name of Konstantin. His Art Blocks biography begins: "My name is Konstantin, I'm a software engineer, doing stuff with computer graphics" [^S01][^S05]. His earlier Art Blocks project, Tentura, was released in the Factory collection on 4 March 2022 as an edition of 777 [^S07]. His GitHub profile holds shader and SVG tools he wrote for CodePen experiments [^S08]. His later Xeno, released on alba.art, is built on fragment shaders and was part of Tiny Geometries, a group show by Dawn Contemporary [^S09]. No interview or talk about SL/CE was found; the mint text is the main artist source.

SL/CE is a sharp turn from that shader work towards flat, hard-edged composition. The credit line reads: "Highly inspired by the masters of Suprematism from the early 20th century" [^S01]. Suprematism, founded by Kazimir Malevich, was first shown at the "0.10" exhibition in Petrograd in 1915. It built pictures from circles, squares and rectangles in limited colours, the same starting figures SL/CE uses [^S10].

The artist's description sets out the method: a simple figure is placed and cut along "slice lines", its parts shifted, rotated or removed; the process repeats; and a "Bad composition detector" sends any "bad" result back to be redone [^S01].

He calls the detector a record of his taste: "It turns out there is a piece of me in this code" [^S01]. He also names the pareidolia effect: "sometimes images works well as profiles pictures, and I am very pleased that I was able to achieve this" [^S01]. His project page gives the release as 3 April, "12CT / 17GMT" [^S11].

## How the work was constructed

The program is a single minified script of 8,715 bytes, SHA-256 `0cfd74ae77e7b5d3f7c96008e33c40f80fdf6f2e463af79e909cf80fd86d8c28`, retrieved from the index and read in full [^S01].

It seeds two xorshift generators, one from each half of the token hash, and alternates between them. It then discards a fixed run of values and draws, in order, a palette, a main-shape value, an angle setting, a "strict" switch and a rounding switch. The five palette colours are shuffled, and the last of them becomes the background [^S01].

A Python re-implementation of the generator and these first draws reproduces every published trait value for all 40 tokens, and predicts background colours that match the renders inspected (own computation from [^S01]).

| Trait (program weight) | Published count of 40 |
| --- | --- |
| Palette: 24 defined, each 1 in 24 | 22 seen; Rome 5; Nepal, Texas, Steel, Orchid 3 each; 6 palettes at 2; 11 at 1 |
| Main shape: Circle 30%, Bars 20%, Square 30%, Trapezoid 20% | 9, 4, 15, 12 |
| Main angle: No angle 80%, Any angle 10%, Small angle 10% | 30, 5, 5 |
| Strict shapes: Yes 35%, No 65% | 21, 19 |
| Rounded shapes: Possible 20% of non-circle draws above 0.4 (about 12%) | 7 |

After those draws, each attempt at a picture runs as follows (code reading) [^S01]:

1. **The main figure.** The main shape is drawn near the centre. Two to five slice lines are laid across the canvas, aligned to the main angle with a little jitter. The figure is cut along each line. Pieces may be shifted, and the smallest discarded.
2. **The secondary figure.** A second figure is placed close to an edge of the first, then sliced in the same way. Here the weights favour bars (55 per cent) over circles, squares and trapezoids (15 per cent each).
3. **The detector.** The frame is then trimmed at the canvas edge. The detector rejects it for too few or too many large pieces, an oversized piece, a figure that does not reach far enough towards the edges, total cover outside a set band, or fewer than five pieces.

Once a composition passes, three more operations make the work's small-scale detail [^S01]:

- **Stripes.** Two or three times, the piece of median size is cut by 44 to 152 parallel lines into strips. Small strips can be turned through 90 degrees and squared off, giving the barcode-like bands of #0 and #1.
- **The "eye".** One ornament is placed inside an existing shape where it clears every edge: concentric circles, nested squares or a small cluster of bars. This single insert most often turns a composition into a face.
- **Colour.** Pieces are numbered by size and coloured in rotation from the four non-background colours.

"Strict shapes: No" adds a slight wobble to circles and a tiny jitter to the corners of bars. "Rounded shapes: Possible" lets each piece with fewer than six corners be rounded, with a 50 per cent chance per piece [^S01].

## Quirks in the algorithm

A full read, checked against all 40 token records and the emulation, found the following.

1. **The project number is built into the seed.** Before any trait is drawn, the program discards exactly 419 random values. That is the project's own number on Art Blocks (code reading) [^S01].
2. **Two figures, not "several".** The description speaks of repeating the process "for several starting figures". In the code, each attempt places one main and one secondary figure, and one ornament afterwards. The richness comes from slicing, not from the number of figures (code reading) [^S01].
3. **The detector can give up.** Composition is retried up to 9,000 times. If no attempt passes, the program keeps the last attempt anyway, so in principle a "bad" composition can be shown (code reading) [^S01].
4. **The generator narrows when you click.** Clicking the lower half draws a new composition, and clicking the upper half starts a slideshow of 1 to 9 seconds per image. Palette, background, main shape and the shape switches stay fixed, but the angle is redrawn only from the upright and 90-degree settings. An "Any angle" or "Small angle" token never shows its tilt again after the first click (code reading) [^S01].
5. **The background is not a trait.** The ground can be any of the palette's five colours. The emulation shows Rome, the commonest palette, on three grounds: dark red (#0, #14), yellow (#21, #29) and near-white (#30). No trait records it (own computation from [^S01]).
6. **Rounding never reached the circles or the bars.** Rounding is switched off whenever the main-shape draw is below 0.4. That covers every circle and the lower half of the bars range, and all four Bars tokens drew below it; #23 by 0.001. So all seven rounded tokens are Squares or Trapezoids (own computation from [^S01]).
7. **Two palettes never minted.** The script defines 24 palettes, but only 22 names occur among the 40 tokens. One unused set runs from off-white through red to pale and deep blue; the other runs from sand through olive and brown to near-black. Their names are not on-chain, since trait labels are produced off-chain [^S01].
8. **"No angle" and "Square" hide variety.** "No angle" covers both the upright and the 90-degree settings. The main square is also rotated separately. In 60 per cent of cases it is turned by a multiple of 45 degrees, and in 36 per cent that turn ignores the main angle altogether. That is how #37, a "Square" with "No angle", comes to be built from triangles (code reading) [^S01].
9. **Dead settings.** A margin variable is fixed at zero and a placement flag is always true. So shapes bleed off the frame, as in #35 and #0 (code reading) [^S01].
10. **Display behaviour.** The canvas fits the window at the 0.618 ratio and always draws at twice the CSS size, whatever the screen. The render function is a global, so any hash can be drawn from the browser console. The earlier AB5D essay measured the media-proxy renders at 1484 by 2400 pixels [^S01][^S03].

## The most coveted variants

No published collector commentary or ranking for SL/CE was found. Recorded resale prices are low and close together (see below), so rarity has not produced clear price tiers. What follows rests on the index counts and the renders [^S01].

**Angled compositions (10 of 40).** Five tokens have "Any angle" (#2, #16, #20, #26, #29) and five "Small angle" (#23, #25, #28, #33, #38) [^S01]. Only these tilt the whole construction, and the live generator cannot reproduce them (quirk 4). #25, held by AB5D, is a Beach-palette disc in pale blue and navy at a slight tilt, with an orange "eye", on yellow.

![SL/CE #25: a tilted disc in pale blue and navy with an orange circle, on yellow](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000025.png)
*SL/CE #25, Beach palette, Small angle, held by AB5D. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Bars (4 of 40).** Bars is the rarest main shape: #23, #24, #30 and #39 [^S01]. #23 combines Bars with a Small angle, the only token to pair the two. Its blue and rust slabs lean together under a long yellow diagonal.

![SL/CE #23: tilted blue and rust slabs crossed by a yellow bar on cream](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000023.png)
*SL/CE #23, Joy palette, Bars with Small angle. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Rounded shapes (7 of 40).** #13, #17, #19, #22, #26, #35 and #36 carry "Possible" [^S01]. In #13 the dark red and taupe slabs have softened corners, and a nested square forms the ornament.

![SL/CE #13: a taupe slab with a nested square and a dark red slab with softened corners, on red](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000013.png)
*SL/CE #13, Texas palette, rounded shapes. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**Single palettes.** Eleven palettes occur once, among them Mono (#9), Desert (#3), Jamaica (#33) and Forest (#35) [^S01]. #35, the only Forest, is among the clearest examples of the pareidolia the artist describes: a dark block with a pale disc reads as a head in profile against olive green.

![SL/CE #35: pale yellow and dark green blocks with a pale disc, like a head in profile, on olive green](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000035.png)
*SL/CE #35, the only Forest palette. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

**The two AB5D tokens.** #37 (the hero image) is a Berry "Square" rotated into a diamond and sliced into two triangles. The lower triangle holds a navy and red eye, and a thin striped band runs across the top. It shares the Berry palette only with #31 [^S01].

## Notable collectors

No museum, DAO or fund was found among the 32 holding addresses [^S01]. The names below are ENS names shown by Etherscan, not verified identities.

- **AB5D** bought #25 and #37 on 22 September 2025, in one OpenSea transaction for 0.471 ETH together. The sellers received 0.207 and 0.22632 ETH, and 0.02355 ETH went to strangerintheq.eth as royalty. The buying address passed both to an AB5D wallet a minute later, and the Art Blocks token pages list AB5D as owner [^S01][^S12][^S13].
- **snowfro.eth** bought #3, the only Desert, for 0.195 ETH on 6 August 2025 and moved it on in a 14-token batch transfer on 7 November 2025 [^S12].
- **talmadge.eth** holds the largest group, three tokens: #20 (Steel, Any angle), #31 (Berry) and #33 (Jamaica, Small angle). Two are among the ten angled outputs, and #33 is the only Jamaica [^S01][^S14].
- **josvromans.eth** minted the final token, #39, a Japan-palette Bars, and transferred it to ab500.jmh.eth on 28 July 2026 [^S15][^S12].
- The artist's address still holds #0 [^S01].

## Sales and provenance

Etherscan records were read for 26 of the 32 transfers after mint that the index records. The sales found are below; the list may be incomplete, and no auction-house sale was found [^S01][^S12].

| Date | Token | Price | Venue |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 28 Apr 2023 | #5 | 0.11 WETH (offer) | OpenSea |
| 11 May 2023 | #25 | 0.19 ETH | OpenSea |
| 27 Jun 2023 | #3 | 0.04 WETH (offer) | OpenSea |
| 26 Aug 2023 | #9 | 0.05 ETH | OpenSea |
| 23 Oct 2023 | #25 | 0.03 WETH (offer) | OpenSea |
| 28 Nov 2023 | #24 | 0.02 ETH | X2Y2 |
| 10 Dec 2023 | #26 | 0.02 ETH | X2Y2 |
| 6 Aug 2025 | #3 | 0.195 ETH | OpenSea |
| 22 Sep 2025 | #25 and #37 | 0.471 ETH together | OpenSea |
| 5 Dec 2025 | #2 | 0.125 WETH | Seaport |

Prices slid below the 0.09 ETH mint price through 2023 and recovered above it in 2025. #25 shows both: 0.19 ETH in May 2023, 0.03 WETH five months later, and about 0.22 ETH in the AB5D purchase (own computation, assuming fees fell pro rata) [^S12].

Three tokens passed through theft. On 7 July 2023 #9 was moved, with 16 other NFTs, in a transaction Etherscan attributes to "inferno-drainer-4.eth"; it resold for 0.05 ETH in August. On 22 November 2023 #24 and #26 went to an address Etherscan labels "Fake_Phishing938463", which sold each on X2Y2 for 0.02 ETH [^S16][^S12].

## The mint

The artist minted #0 on 16 February 2023, a week before activation, paying 0.13 ETH through a set-price minter [^S01][^S15].

The public sale on 3 April 2023 was an exponential Dutch auction with settlement. The index's minter record gives a start price of 2 ETH at 17:00 UTC, halving every 400 seconds, and a resting price of 0.09 ETH, reached at about 17:30 UTC [^S01]. The first public buyer, at 17:27:23, sent 0.12390625 ETH [^S15]. Under settlement, earlier buyers are refunded down to the final price, recorded as 0.09 ETH across 14 settleable mints [^S01]. The auction found almost no demand above its floor. The index's project-level price field reads 0, so the earlier AB5D essay gave no price [^S01][^S03]. The Art Blocks page now says "Fixed price", reflecting the later minter [^S05].

Minting was slow for a 40-piece edition. One hour after the start 11 tokens existed including #0; after a day, 16; after a week, 20; after 30 days, 27. The last September 2023 mint made 39 [^S01]. Thirty-eight tokens came through the auction minter. The last, #39, was minted on 28 February 2024 for 0.09 ETH through a separate set-price minter, by the address with the ENS name josvromans.eth [^S01][^S15]. The index records completion on 17 April 2024 [^S01].

On 4 April 2023 the artist withdrew the auction revenue of 1.26 ETH, that is 14 mints at 0.09 ETH. The contract paid 0.126 ETH to the render provider, 1.0206 ETH to strangerintheq.eth and 0.1134 ETH to an additional payee [^S15]. The minter record sets that payee at 10 per cent [^S01]. The project record promises that "10% of all sales will be donated to a non-profit organization to help children with mental and intellectual disabilities" [^S01]. The payee address has no public label on Etherscan, so it cannot be confirmed as that non-profit [^S14].

![SL/CE #0: a grey slab with a yellow ring, a striped vertical bar and white bars on dark red](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000000.png)
*SL/CE #0, Rome palette, minted by the artist on 16 February 2023. Render: Art Blocks media proxy.*

## Copyright and licensing

The index records `CC BY 4.0` with a link to the Creative Commons legal code [^S01][^S17]. This is more open than most Art Blocks licences: anyone may copy, adapt and use the images, commercially too, with credit and an indication of changes [^S17]. The licence label refers to the work; the program carries no separate code licence and needs no external library [^S01].

## Significance and limitations

SL/CE is a small, carefully built homage to Suprematism. Its main interest is an aesthetic judge written into the code, with its thresholds visible in the program. Each token is also a generator, but with limits: tilted tokens lose their tilt when regenerated, and the background, the most visible choice in each picture, is never recorded as a trait [^S01].

Its market and critical record is thin: a Dutch auction that cleared at its floor, and resales between 0.02 and about 0.25 ETH (the upper figure for #37 is own computation). No auction-house sale, museum holding, exhibition, interview or video about the project was found. The evidence rests on the program, the index, on-chain records and the artist's own text.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Is the 10 per cent additional payee the promised non-profit for children with disabilities, and is there a public record of the donation? No label or statement was found.
2. What are the trait names of the two palettes that were never minted? They would be in the off-chain features script.
3. Why does the index record completion on 17 April 2024, seven weeks after the last mint?
4. Several details came from automated WebFetch extraction and were not confirmed by a second reading: the "Fixed price" label and release time on the artist's and Art Blocks' pages, the Tiny Geometries show on the Xeno page, and Etherscan's ENS names, phishing labels and the split of the 0.471 ETH purchase.
5. The artist's X account (@stranger_intheq) could not be fetched, and the Dawn Contemporary exhibition page on alba.art returned an error. Both are leads for the development story, exhibitions and any SL/CE outputs shown offline.

## Bibliography

### Primary: the work and the artist

[^S01]: Art Blocks public GraphQL index, `projects_metadata` for project 419 (including the full program) and `tokens_metadata` for all 40 tokens. Also `project_minter_configurations`, `primary_purchases` and `transfers_metadata` for the project. Retrieved 20 and 21 September 2026 via https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql. Collection page: https://www.artblocks.io/collection/slce-by-stranger-in-the-q
[^S11]: Stranger in the Q, "SL/CE", project page. Read 20 September 2026. https://strangerintheq.art/slice
[^S05]: Art Blocks, "SL/CE by Stranger in the Q", project page with artist biography. Read 20 September 2026. https://www.artblocks.io/collections/presents/projects/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419
[^S13]: Art Blocks token pages, SL/CE #25 and #37. Read 20 September 2026. https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000025 and https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069/419000037
[^S07]: Art Blocks, "Tentura by Stranger in the Q", project page (Factory). Read 21 September 2026. https://www.artblocks.io/collections/factory/projects/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/265
[^S09]: Stranger in the Q, "Xeno", project page, naming the Tiny Geometries group show by Dawn Contemporary. Read 21 September 2026. https://strangerintheq.art/xeno/
[^S08]: Stranger in the Q, GitHub profile. https://github.com/strangerintheq
[^S17]: Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International, legal code. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

### Platform

[^S02]: Art Blocks, `artblocks-contracts` README, table of core contracts ("AB Core V3", projects 374 onwards). https://github.com/ArtBlocks/artblocks-contracts/blob/main/packages/contracts/README.md
[^S04]: Art Blocks, "Presents". https://www.artblocks.io/discover/presents
[^S06]: Art Blocks, "Introducing Art Blocks 500". https://www.artblocks.io/articles/art-blocks-500-complete-collection

### Video and audio

No video, podcast or talk about SL/CE or its artist was found in searches on 20 and 21 September 2026.

### Criticism, collecting and market

[^S03]: AB5D, "SL/CE by Stranger in the Q", earlier series essay. Read 20 September 2026. https://ab5d.xyz/series/slce-by-stranger-in-the-q/
[^S15]: Etherscan, primary-market transactions for SL/CE, read 21 September 2026: #0 purchase, 16 February 2023, https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3950e138c1afcb3d04aa5dde88054e3d7adfd4f8ac53475b0bdc647c739de3f1 ; #1 purchase, 3 April 2023, https://etherscan.io/tx/0x388daa49d03980904dc92f07391d94d6d435fa7a5f65d657730a364b9c3c107e ; auction revenue withdrawal, 4 April 2023, https://etherscan.io/tx/0x02c2e83b384f4d33edeb380e1adff804b00992e94f3632ded24b9965397f6e67 ; #39 purchase, 28 February 2024, https://etherscan.io/tx/0x9db544a1ba95d5df7e219cbc1e3fd35b1ceb9111c0d3d51dfda49808898729ce
[^S12]: Etherscan, secondary transactions for SL/CE, read 21 September 2026: #5 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xefb74441f76d1c1a8190af6d247cbe6e704afd4493ea06ff8a59e6b7c58bebae ; #25 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6e990634ec90f16c81c8d79f346751f6f1c88f6c4189f8eee66de2a065cf4e8c and https://etherscan.io/tx/0x899f3b90ad42e9fcc0fb75973d2348540ea27d0a06175f526aef8a05e309970f ; #3 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x585ae17f11c14d68cfb163c5fe530b57aeb519711e13fca5497ee24a8faf9584 , https://etherscan.io/tx/0x42aa6968ae8d05582afe1fe5171abeabd97ea963038b6a7b6e09f47a33327cb4 and https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1893be3d895ef0b3a5170c77eac7d80c41f762d0ed2620fd06cbd61ed48fa0dd ; #9 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x83139d8773763b0a22bdd72513b64b276dd6415dc7c38ac5788d872676afc2ac ; #24 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x709af7b0676a613d44fa9f59902b596626ab379e7c95d2d35be3e7a29e05ba3d ; #26 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x29ba6cd9870a0a911082c4b7e2a7291919d4d1fd054e45cddb42f6f026e7ebed ; #25 and #37 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1d1588db834f89a91d1f457981669c67b122b97e5ddec01dd27eda255c4214b8 ; #2 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x10c2a525a306fc6f3a46363ff0deef1bb986dd28823fe875701a6bf1d53be31f ; #39 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xddb91117898d3e2c7ef822a1bcd52e0c226c3b51b3081927ee2466b38bf87d1f
[^S14]: Etherscan address pages, read 21 September 2026: talmadge.eth, https://etherscan.io/address/0x5a5617ba16beba3d04ae3c6b1e9d522c1856763c ; additional payee, https://etherscan.io/address/0x2f64b87e4d1796bab9814be520d8743551850a7b
[^S16]: Etherscan, transactions labelled as phishing, read 21 September 2026: #9, 7 July 2023, https://etherscan.io/tx/0xa96b532e28bd7ca0c1722208f57bf32678b383f5be9f1261b2a1786805fa3434 ; #24 and #26, 22 November 2023, https://etherscan.io/tx/0xe27ef193f3b44d463ec10bc34197d1efefeb5a56765f4c7f387693e96afcb203

### Further reading

[^S10]: Wikipedia, "Suprematism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism

- Stranger in the Q on CodePen. https://codepen.io/strangerintheq
- Stranger in the Q on X (not fetched). https://x.com/stranger_intheq
- OpenSea, "SL/CE by Stranger in the Q" collection page. https://opensea.io/collection/sl-ce-by-stranger-in-the-q