Sonoran Roadways

The work and its context

Sonoran Roadways is project 461 on the Art Blocks contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. The index records 54 invocations against a maximum of 54, the runtime p5@1.0.0, a square aspect ratio, the "presents" vertical and the licence CC BY-NC 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹. The Art Blocks project page lists it as an Art Blocks 500 release in the Presents category, dated 15 June 2023 ². The current price field reads 0, because the work was sold by auction (see the mint, below) ¹.

The project description opens: "Long drives can be seen as a monotonous chore, or a peaceful solace." It calls the work "a prompt to see the road as a conduit for joyous return to places we find special" ¹. Half of the artist's release proceeds were pledged to GiveDirectly ¹.

Every output shows one scene: a road running from the bottom edge to a vanishing point on a high horizon, with bands of ground on either side, a line of peaks and a sky. Everything is built from dots on square lattices. The picture is cut into a grid of patches, and each patch has its own dot size and spacing ¹³.

Jake Rockland, who publishes as Purphat, was chief technology officer of Art Blocks. His site now describes him as a software engineer at Google ⁴⁵. His artist address carries the ENS name stipple.eth ⁶. He talked about both roles on the UpOnly podcast in 2021 and on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast in 2022, before this project ⁷⁸. Sonoran Roadways was his fifth Art Blocks project, after Stipple Sunsets, Patchwork Saguaros, Speckled Summits (all 2021) and Dot Matrix Gradient Study (2021). Opuntia followed in 2024 ⁴.

Conception and development

The description places the work in a sequence. Stipple Sunsets was "the escape of the beach", Patchwork Saguaros the Sonoran desert "home I grew up in", and Speckled Summits the Rocky Mountain "home I find now". Sonoran Roadways turns to "the transition of travel" between them ¹. Rockland's earlier writing gives the background: he spent most of his adolescence "in the Sonoran desert of Tucson, Arizona", and grew up "admiring the quilt work of my bubbie (grandmother)" ⁹.

The description names that inheritance directly. The style is an "homage to stencil-like qualities of silkscreen printmaking", made by "the grandson of two artists who worked in the mediums of printmaking, paper cutting, and quilt making" ¹. In a 2021 interview he said his style "takes a lot of inspiration from printmaking techniques" learned "through the work of my grandparents", and pledged: "I will always donate at least 50% of each drop" ¹⁰. Sonoran Roadways kept the pledge ¹.

The description also points to Dot Matrix Gradient Study, his abstract project, for "distortion and 'digital misprinting' applied to the stipple matrices, but with a return to a figurative form" ¹. Its creative credit thanks his grandparents, a friend "0x113d" for feedback during development, and his fiancée for "being the best road trip partner" ¹.

His project page describes the method. The scene starts as a drawing of layered shapes, a "coordinate blueprint" that he translates "into the various 'digital screens' that the generative algorithm iterates through" ³. The same page names six palettes: Preserves and Lenny reused from earlier projects, plus Salmon, Bubblegum, Omelet and Poppy. It describes Salmon as "soft pink and deep blue" and Poppy as wildflowers "against a backdrop of sky and stone" ³. It also says the work has "three different variations of horizon roadway scenes (with a bonus fourth 'sun match' variation)" ³. That sentence matters for the first quirk below.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 7,595 bytes, SHA-256 777959d37cf56458bd7542e52cea7b418aef02c3ac82a0d5aef1ead70991ecfd. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full ¹. I ported its generator and decisions to Python. The port reproduces all five published traits of all 54 tokens exactly (own computation) ¹.

The script seeds a small sfc32 generator from the token hash, as Rockland's 2021 scripts did ¹¹¹. It then:

1. Draws one palette from a list of seven entries. The palette's four colours are shuffled onto the road, the peaks, the sky and the ground. A second, independent shuffle of the same palette is kept as set B.
2. Draws the horizon height (37, 37.5 or 38 per cent of the canvas), the quilt size and the scene (Trip Status).
3. Sets switches for Double-quilted, a hidden "misprint" mode, the hue gradient, and three offsets of 3 to 7 units ¹.

The drawing works on a 1,000-unit square. For each patch the script draws a fresh stipple: dots 4, 6 or 7 units wide on a spacing equal to the dot or one unit wider, so the dots touch or nearly touch (code reading) ¹. It then walks every unit of the patch and places a dot where both coordinates are multiples of the spacing. A dot's colour depends on the region it falls in, tested in order: the road's centre line, the road, three mountain layers, the sky, a darker band of ground either side of the road, and the rest of the ground ¹. The regions are polygons stored as fractions of the canvas, which fits the hand-drawn blueprint ³¹.

Expected values are my computation from the program's weights; counts are from the index ¹. The Trip Status counts are "What a beautiful view" and "Are we there yet?" (15 each), then "Should have offline'd this podcast" and "Lost in thought" (12 each) ¹.

"Flat Colors: false" is the hue gradient the artist describes as "more fluid and dreamy" ³. Each dot's hue is scaled down by its distance from the vanishing point, so colours drift round the wheel towards the edges of the picture while brightness and saturation stay fixed (code reading) ¹. In #43 the blue sky turns cyan at the corners.

In a Double-quilted work the right half of the canvas uses colour set B and a second stipple, with dots from 4 to 15 units wide (code reading) ¹. The seam falls down the road's centre line.

Quirks in the algorithm

All points were checked against the 54 published token records through the Python port. Code-only claims are marked.

1. "Lost in thought" never draws its own scene. Each of the three mountain functions picks its polygon by Trip Status. The test for the second scene compares a misspelled property, p.m_m_V, which does not exist, so it always fails ¹. The 12 "Lost in thought" tokens fall through to the geometry of "What a beautiful view": two peaks and a sun. The only difference is colour. In "What a beautiful view" the sun is the sky colour brightened; in "Lost in thought" it is the mountain colour brightened (code reading) ¹. The valley and small central peak written for "Lost in thought" appear in no output (own computation, from rendered region masks). The artist's page shows four composition images but only three geometries, and speaks of three scenes plus a "sun match" variation ³. It is unclear whether the typo was noticed and accepted, or whether the fourth scene was dropped on purpose.
2. Preserves is twice as likely. The palette list holds Preserves twice, and the draw takes one of seven entries. Preserves therefore has a 2-in-7 chance against 1 in 7 for the others. It is the most common palette, with 15 tokens; Bubblegum has only 3 ¹.
3. A hidden misprint switch. Every dot is pushed diagonally by one of the offsets. In half of the outputs a second, unlabelled switch gives dots whose coordinates meet a bitwise test a different offset. This scatters stray dots across the lattice and gives the embossed, misregistered texture seen in most renders ¹. Twenty-four tokens have the switch; it appears in no trait (own computation). #5, which lacks it, is visibly smooth.
4. Double-quilted halves can match. Set B is a reshuffle of the same palette. In #4, #33 and #39 the shuffle came out identical, so their right halves change only in dot size (own computation) ¹. In #15, #25, #34 and #52 the colours swap roles across the seam.
5. A mixed-up argument. The offset function calls the half-canvas test with the dot's vertical coordinate where the canvas width belongs. In Double-quilted works the misprint pattern therefore splits along a diagonal rather than the centre line (code reading) ¹.
6. Wasted draws and dead code. Four stipple values drawn at set-up are overwritten in every patch before use. Two helper functions are never called, a horizontal offset is always zero, and the horizon function ignores its x coordinate (code reading) ¹. The "6x6" quilt is folded into 4x4, which explains 4x4's double share.
7. Half the hash is ignored. The seed uses four eight-digit slices, the last starting one character late. The script reads 32 of the 64 hex digits, as in Patchwork Saguaros and Speckled Summits (code reading) ¹¹¹.
8. A click counts the dots. Clicking an output opens an alert giving the number of dots drawn, with the words "that's a long drive", and the traits ¹. Patch loops include both edges, so dots on a shared seam are drawn, and counted, twice (code reading). By my port the counts run from 20,164 (#39, with large right-half dots) to 42,610 (#50). #43 has 42,048, the second highest (own computation, not checked against the live alert).
9. Small windows may crop. The drawing is made on a buffer at least 1,000 pixels wide, then copied at the window's size. On my reading of p5 1.0.0, a screen smaller than 1,000 pixels shows only the top-left part of the picture (code reading, not tested in a browser) ¹. The 2,400-pixel media renders are unaffected.

The most coveted variants

No sales survey or collector commentary on the series was found. Rarity is read here from the index and the program ¹.

Bubblegum (3). #7, #28 and #35 are the only Bubblegum outputs: pale pink, plum and lavender, which the artist likens to cotton-candy sunsets ¹³. #7 adds flat colours and the sun scene at 8 × 8 ¹.

Split palettes (4). The Double-quilted works whose colours swap across the seam are the most visibly unusual. #25 is Lenny, the second-scarcest palette: a neon green road and grey ground on the left, a white road and black ground on the right ¹.

Other readings. Nine outputs have the finest 10 × 10 quilt, and fourteen the broad 2 × 2 ¹. The four artist mints, #0 to #3, are the only tokens minted before the public sale ¹. Some collectors may prefer outputs with the misprint texture, which the description presents as the project's technique ¹.

Sales. Prices have been modest. #43 was minted for 0.3 ETH, resold 36 minutes later for 0.292 ETH, sold again for 0.16 WETH in March 2024, and for 0.543 ETH on 27 September 2025 ⁶. #34 and #46 were bought together for 1.119 ETH on 25 June 2023 ⁶. Verse gives a highest sale of $2,181 and a total volume of $23,388 ¹². The index recorded a floor of 0.4 ETH at retrieval ¹.

Notable collectors

At retrieval 34 addresses held the 54 tokens ¹.

• Snowfro. The Art Blocks project page shows #48 as owned by Snowfro ². Etherscan shows snowfro.eth buying it for 0.375 ETH at 18:18 UTC on mint day, then moving it with 22 other Art Blocks tokens to another address in October 2023 ⁶.
• AB5D. #43 reached ab500dao.eth in a bulk transfer on 27 September 2025, minutes after its 0.543 ETH sale ⁶¹.
• The artist. stipple.eth, the artist address in the index, still holds #0 to #3 ¹⁶.
• The largest holder has eight tokens, received in one transfer on 21 September 2023 from the address that minted #5; no source names it ¹.
• An address beginning 0x113d minted #18 and still holds it. The creative credit thanks a friend "0x113d", but no source ties the two ¹.

Prints

Rockland sells hand-signed prints of his Art Blocks works to token holders, at 24 by 24 inches for 300 DAI or 36 by 36 inches for 400 DAI. They are "limited in edition to token holders, but not limited in total edition size" ¹³. When read, the page did not list Sonoran Roadways among the covered projects, and it publishes no ledger of printed tokens ¹³. No print, exhibition or other physical form of Sonoran Roadways was found.

The mint

The artist minted #0 to #3 between 22:56 and 23:35 UTC on 5 June 2023. Etherscan records #0 at 0 ETH, through a different minter from the public sale ¹⁶. The index records activation at 17:35 UTC on 6 June and the public start at 17:00 UTC on 15 June ¹.

The sale used Art Blocks' MinterDAExpSettlementV1 contract, an exponential Dutch auction with settlement. Its methods let buyers reclaim excess settlement funds ¹⁴. The first public mint, #4, came at 17:07:47 UTC for 1.8875 ETH; #5 followed at 1.7408 ETH ⁶. Only three public mints came in the first ten minutes (own computation). The last, #53, was minted at 17:26:47 for 0.2824 ETH, 26 minutes and 47 seconds after the start (own computation) ¹⁶. On the settlement design, early buyers could reclaim the difference down to the final price; whether they did was not checked ¹⁴.

Rockland's Speckled Summits had been, by the Art Blocks newsletter's account, the platform's first Dutch auction, and it sold out at its starting price in 2021 ¹⁵. Here the price fell for more than twenty minutes before the edition sold out.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 with a link to the deed ¹¹⁶. On that label, images may be shared and adapted non-commercially with attribution; commercial use needs the artist's permission. The script carries no separate code licence, as the earlier AB5D essay also noted ¹⁷. p5.js, loaded by the platform, is licensed under LGPL 2.1 ¹⁸. The blueprint image belongs to the artist and is linked, not re-hosted.

Significance and limitations

Sonoran Roadways returns to Rockland's stippled landscapes after two years, now as a road trip between the places of his earlier series. It keeps his generator, touching dots and patch quilting, and adds a vanishing-point hue gradient, split halves and a misprint texture ¹³. Its code has a notable flaw: one of its four named scenes never renders, so the edition has three geometries, a fact the artist's own "sun match" wording seems to acknowledge ¹³. Its limits are those of the record: no artist essay beyond the project page, no criticism, no physical works and a thin market.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Was the "Lost in thought" typo known before release? Did the artist mean the sun-in-mountain-colour scene to be his "sun match" variation, and what did the unreachable valley scene look like?
2. Is the window crop real in current browsers? A test render at 600 pixels would settle it.
3. What did the GiveDirectly gift amount to, and did early buyers reclaim their settlement excess? Which token made Verse's $2,181 high?
4. Web search was exhausted during this research. Interviews, X posts by @purphat and any Art Blocks Presents announcement for the release remain unchecked.
5. The quotes from the project page, prints page and artynft interview, and the Etherscan prices and ENS names, came through automated WebFetch extraction and should be confirmed.

Bibliography