Squares

The work and its context

Squares is Art Blocks project 330 on the contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. It was released in the Factory vertical. The index records 196 invocations against a maximum of 196, the script type js@na (plain JavaScript with no library), an aspect ratio of 1:1 and the licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ¹. Art Blocks now lists it under Presents, with Factory as its heritage label ²³.

The project text reads: "'Squares' utilizes the shape of a square as a unit of construction, combining and overlapping them at various scales". It ends with the line that has become its tagline: "something along the lines of Bauhaus meets Blade Runner" ¹⁴. Each output is a cluster of translucent, stepped rectangles floating over a soft field of blurred colour, all under a heavy film grain. The squares are laid over one another with blend modes, so the colour shifts, darkens or glows where they overlap ¹.

Martin Grasser is a Bay Area artist and designer ⁵⁶. He is best known outside art for the Twitter bird of 2012, which he designed with Todd Waterbury and Angy Che ⁷⁸. Digiday describes him as the founder of the design firm Studio Mococo, with clients including PayPal, SoftBank, Bumble and Rdio ⁹. His typeface Color Dot Font was nominated in the Experimental category of the Tokyo Type Directors Club awards in 2021 ⁶¹⁰. Squares was his first generative release on Art Blocks. He later called it "my breakthrough moment in web3" ⁸⁵.

Conception and development

Grasser says he began making art with code "around 2008", after he "was introduced to Processing" ¹¹. His portfolio sets Squares beside older series that work the same way by hand or by machine: Xerography, Spray Paintings, Newspaper Forms, News Abstractions and the Color Dot Font ¹². A UCLA lecture listing gives his own summary of the practice: "His work explores systems and forms of repetition" ¹³¹⁴.

Squares began as a physical collage. In a December 2022 interview he said: "In 2015/2016, I had one blurry photo of color, which I started putting rectangles over". The rectangles "were cut out of paper", and "it was some time before the project became purely digital" ¹¹. As the code section below shows, that blurry photograph appears to survive inside the program itself.

The second source is type design. Grasser was "especially interested in how each letter of a monospace font must fill a fixed space". He wanted "a simple repeatable form that could modulate from extremely small sizes to the size of the entire canvas" ¹¹. In 2024 he told Bright Moments that Squares is "essentially set up as a monospace typeface", built "on a grid and a fixed canvas" ¹⁵. He also described the method: black forms on white make "the stair-step shapes in Squares", and blending light and colour creates "intersections, overlaps, and moving color" ¹⁵.

Grasser uses "we" when he describes building the grid system ¹¹. The project record thanks "Arsh and Audrey Chen", with further help from V.E. Chen, Laksh Arora and Vanna Vu ¹. Arsh, Audrey Chen and Laksh Arora are also named as the team on his later Portraits project ⁵.

How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 16,866 bytes, SHA-256 099489bfb58d7d345a2d91fd77c891184325d20559846cc41678ca1d763aeb1b. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full. It is a minified build: its palettes, colours and layer recipes are stored as compressed strings that it unpacks at load. No code is reproduced here ¹.

It seeds two small 128-bit generators from the two halves of the token hash, warms each up with 500,000 calls, and alternates between them ¹. For this essay the compressed data was unpacked and the program's selection logic was replayed in Node.js for all 196 hashes. The replay reproduced the published Palette, Grid, Square, Layers, Flats, Shapes, Images and Effects of every token (own computation) ¹.

The photograph. Every background comes from one embedded image: a 40 by 53 pixel PNG, tagged as saved by Adobe ImageReady, showing soft horizontal bands of green, grey-blue, red, cream and pink ¹. The program stretches it to a 3,000 pixel square with smoothing on, then adds grain (see the quirks) (code reading). An "image" layer rotates this picture by 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, enlarges it between 1.2 and 5.3 times, and shifts it to a window set by the palette. At those zooms a few source pixels fill the canvas, which gives the blurred "fields of light" ¹. That matches Grasser's account of starting from "one blurry photo of color" ¹¹. Whether it is the same photograph is not confirmed.

Palettes. There are 23 palettes, each an ordered stack of layers. Each stack has one or two image layers, flat colour washes ("Flats"), stepped shapes ("Shapes") and tone-curve "Effects". Each layer is composited with its own blend mode and opacity ¹. Soft-light accounts for 111 of the 207 layer definitions and overlay for 40. Screen, colour-burn, colour-dodge, lighten, multiply, hue, saturation and luminosity appear a few times each (own computation) ¹. All 23 palettes have weight 1, so each has a 1 in 23 chance. The published counts run from 5 (Good Evening, King Yellow) to 15 (Folio) against an expectation of about 8.5 ¹.

The stepped squares. A shape layer draws a square of 1, 3, 4 or 5 cells (the Square trait) at the centre of a grid of 9 to 25 cells (the Grid trait). From each of its four corners it grows a staircase of random rises and spans, and it can notch the corners where two staircases meet ¹. The shape is filled either "in" (a solid stepped block) or "out" (colour everywhere except the block, like a window). It is then shifted by up to two grid cells ¹. Every shape layer builds a new staircase on the same grid, so the layers nest and slip against one another. This is the "stair-step" construction Grasser describes ¹⁵.

The grid rule is picked from those the palette allows, and the published Construction trait names that rule. The replay shows each Construction label maps to exactly one rule ¹.

The two smallest grids, 9x9 and 11x11, are the only ones with no random shift, so their shapes always sit dead centre (code reading) ¹. The work draws once and stays still. It has no interaction or animation. The canvas is always 3,000 pixels square, and a resize handler only changes its displayed size ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 196 token records and the Node.js replay, turned up the following. Where a point rests on the code alone, it is marked as a code reading.

1. The grain is not on the chain. The composition is fully set by the hash, but the grain is not. It is made from a 6,000 by 6,000 field of browser Math.random noise, drawn as black at random opacity and laid over the photograph in soft-light. Every load therefore has a slightly different grain, and no two renders of a token match pixel for pixel (code reading) ¹. The earlier AB5D essay also noted this ¹⁶. The noise buffer alone is 144 MB (code reading).
2. A grid that never appeared. One of the 18 grid rules is a 12x12 grid with a single-cell square, the only even-sized grid. Only the Orchard palette can choose it, with a 1 in 6 chance. None of the nine Orchard outputs did, so no Squares uses it ¹. On an even grid a one-cell centre square would sit on half-cell lines, off the grid everything else follows (code reading). The Construction labels run in even numbers from Two to Thirty-six, and "Six" is the only one missing. That suggests, but does not prove, that the unused rule was "Six".
3. Reversed ranges. Three ranges are written high-to-low, and the integer helper then gives a narrower set of values. Wave's first image is meant to zoom from 3.0 to 3.5. It can only reach 3.1 to 3.4, and the 12 Wave outputs use exactly those values. The rule labelled Thirty was written with steps 0 to 3 cells long but produces only 1s and 2s. Fourteen always takes steps of 2, so its staircases are perfectly regular ¹ (own computation).
4. Traits that repeat the palette. Layers, Flats, Shapes, Images and Effects are fixed by the palette, so five of the eleven traits add no information once the palette is known ¹. Flats 0 means Eleven Plus Eleven. Effects 3 and Layers 14 both mean LA Rain. Images 2 means one of five palettes: LA Rain, Umunhum, Yes, Wave or Orchard (42 outputs) ¹. Construction in turn fixes Grid, and mostly fixes Square.
5. Labels that describe only part of the work. On the 42 two-image outputs, Zoom reports only the larger of the two zooms, and the other goes unrecorded. On #7 the recorded 3 is the base image, and the second image at 2.4 is not listed. On #118 the recorded 3.7 is the second image, and the base image at 3.1 is not listed ¹. Rotation reads "Multiple" whenever there are two images, even when both are vertical. On #118 both images are turned 90 degrees, and on #116 they are turned 90 and 270 ¹.
6. A duplicated, solarising curve. Three tone curves are defined, but the first and third are byte-for-byte identical. That curve is not monotonic: it rises to about 219 and then folds the brightest values back down to about 85, a solarisation that darkens highlights. The second curve crushes the midtones ¹. The first curve is used by 41 outputs. On the 23 Tennis and Flowers outputs, #36 among them, it has no blend mode, so their whole canvas is remapped through it (own computation).
7. Dead switches and leftovers. A flag that would force the last step of a staircase to rise by one is always off. A second flag that picks rounding at the corners is always on. The shape routine applies a zero translation and a scale of one, and the noise generator keeps the stub of an inlined helper. The weighted palette draw is never weighted, because every weight is 1 (code reading) ¹.
8. Palettes are places in the photograph. Each image layer's shift is set by the palette, not left free. Folio, for example, always takes its window from one extreme edge of the stretched image, and Good Morning and Good Evening from near another. A palette is therefore partly a chosen region of the one photograph, then recoloured by its flats and blends (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No source inspected names grails or records a trait-driven sale, so this section describes the rarest structures in the data rather than collector consensus. Grasser's own explanation of the work's appeal is modest: "even though they are simple, they have nuance and detail" ¹¹.

The only 11x11 (Construction Four). #29 is the single output on the Four rule. It pairs a centred shape on the second-smallest grid with the two-image Umunhum palette and eight shape layers, the most any palette has ¹.

The 9x9 grids (Construction Two, 4 of 196). #13, #44, #74 and #127 have the coarsest grid, which gives the largest, blockiest steps ¹.

LA Rain (9 of 196). LA Rain is the only palette with three Effects layers and 14 layers in all, the deepest stack in the set. It sets a black ground and two photograph layers under repeated contrast curves ¹. #7 shows its bruised blues and pinks.

Eleven Plus Eleven (7 of 196). This is the only palette with no flat washes. The photograph and five shapes carry all the colour ¹. #6 is a quiet example in orange with a pink bar.

Mislabelled "Multiple". #118, a Wave output with both images vertical, is the clearest case of quirk 5 ¹.

Notable collectors

• Flamingo DAO bought five Squares in its sweep of 26 generative collections, reported on 1 December 2023 at 448 ETH in total ¹⁷¹⁸. The tokens and wallet are not named in the sources inspected.
• The artist. The artist address in the project record holds 10 Squares, including #0, which it minted a week before the sale, and #185, the only output with Zoom 2.7 ¹.
• Concentration. At retrieval the 196 tokens were held by 116 addresses. The largest held 12 and no source ties it to a name. The index records 1,006 transfers after the mints, and only eight tokens are still in the wallet that minted them (own computation) ¹.
• AB5D holds #36, a Flowers output with a 19x19 grid and the solarising curve. The index shows it changed hands nine times before reaching the AB5D wallet on 12 October 2025 ¹.

Squares in physical form

No print programme, plotter edition or exhibition of Squares was found. Grasser's portfolio lists physical series (Spray Paintings, Newspaper Sculptures), but none for Squares ¹². At Bright Moments Paris in 2024, "A Temporary Arrangement of Material" arranged spray-painted papers from 2010 to 2013 by a generative process ¹⁵⁶. Portraits (with TRAME) is a set of mirrors whose words are "algorithmically translated into nestling rectangles of color" ⁵. Since Squares began as paper rectangles over a photograph, a physical edition would be a natural step, but none was found.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted by the artist's address on 13 July 2022 at 08:12:41 UTC, before activation on 15 July at 20:00:41 UTC ¹. The public sale opened at 17:00 UTC on 20 July. Only five tokens were minted in the first ten minutes, and the edition sold out at 17:20:17 UTC ¹. The index's price field reads 0 ¹. On-chain transactions show a falling-price (Dutch) auction. The first public mint sent 2 ETH at 17:00:26 and a mint at 17:08:18 sent about 1.144 ETH. #6 sent 0.62 ETH at 17:16:30, and one of the final mints sent about 0.485 ETH at 17:20:17 ¹⁹. 190 of the 196 were minted from 17:16 onwards, in the last four minutes and near the bottom of the curve ¹¹⁹. The index's lowest listing at retrieval was about 0.4999 ETH, close to that closing price ¹.

The project record commits "10% of all proceeds" to Every Shelter, an organisation "building a localized refugee-aid ecosystem" ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed (the stored label has a stray leading space) ¹²⁰. On that licence the images may be shared non-commercially with attribution, but not adapted. Crops, recolourings and derivative prints need the artist's permission. The program has no separate code licence and loads no library ¹.

Significance and limitations

Squares shows a designer's constraint turned into a generative system. It takes a monospace cell, a staircase and one blurred photograph, and uses blend modes to get depth from overlap ¹¹¹⁵. The code adds three findings: one embedded image behind every background, five traits fixed by the palette, and grain that changes at every load. The weak side of this draft is the market: no auction, record sale or grail lore for Squares was found.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Is the embedded 40 by 53 pixel image the "one blurry photo of color" from 2015 or 2016 that Grasser describes? He could confirm this.
2. What were the Dutch auction's starting price, resting price and decay schedule? Only individual transaction values were checked here.
3. Which five Squares did Flamingo DAO buy in late 2023, and are they still held? Was the 10% donation to Every Shelter made?
4. Has Squares ever been printed or exhibited? Grasser's August 2025 post about a Squares video "made for a website we are working on" is a lead, but X could not be read (https://x.com/martingrasser/status/1953203842893660321).
5. The interview quotations here come from automated WebFetch extraction of the Substack, Bright Moments, Decrypt and nft now pages and should be checked against the originals.

Bibliography