Subscapes

The work and its context

Subscapes is project 53 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 650 invocations against a maximum of 650, the runtime label js@na (plain JavaScript, no library), a square aspect ratio, the licence label CC BY-NC 4.0 and a price field of 0.17 ETH ¹. The project text describes "a generative algorithm that draws the impression of a landscape from a multitude of possibilities" ¹.

Each output is a square slab of invented terrain seen from above at an angle, like a block cut out of a relief model. Its surface is covered in pen-like strokes, and its exposed sides are banded with fine lines that read as strata ¹². DesLauriers describes the landscapes as drawn "as if it were mechanically plotted by a team of geologists surveying the metaverse" ³.

DesLauriers, born in Toronto in 1990, is a code-based artist and a prolific author of open-source graphics tools. Art Blocks lists exhibitions at venues including Kunsthalle Zürich and MoCA Taipei, and teaching at the Bartlett School of Architecture ⁴. Subscapes was his first Art Blocks project. It was followed later in 2021 by Meridian, and Le Random describes both as exploring "the aesthetics of changing landscapes and terrains" ⁵⁶.

Conception and development

DesLauriers wrote a three-part essay on the project: a preface, a guide to the traits and a technical account ³⁷⁸. The preface says he was invited onto the Curated track in April 2021 ³. He places the work in a lineage of early computer art: "Vera Molnár, Lillian Schwartz, Georg Nees, Harold Cohen, and many others" ³. He stresses the on-chain form, with the whole program stored in the transaction data rather than on a server ³.

The preface was first posted on 4 May 2021, and Substack then "spontaneously deleted my account and all of my written content within an hour" ³.

The traits essay shows how deliberately the rarities were set. Of Starfall he writes that he "did not want too many as I felt it detracted from the general look & feel" ⁷. Of Lattice he recalls finding a bug the day before release, which produced "too many 'holes'", and deciding "to leave it in as a feature that occurs 50% of the time" ⁷. The technical essay adds that the algorithm is about 17 KB of minified JavaScript. It also explains that the 3D scene is reduced to 2D lines, points and polygons so that the same output could go to a canvas, an SVG file or a pen plotter ⁸. He has also discussed his tools and methods in filmed talks ⁹¹⁰.

In an Art Blocks interview he said: "I wanted to create the experience of hunting through landscapes" ¹¹. Because the code "has no dependencies and can even run in a command-line terminal", he saw future uses such as "running Subscapes through a mechanical pen plotter" ¹¹. The release also had a sibling. A Floor is Rising podcast episode notes that he dropped "companion pieces on HEN at the same time", one of the first multi-platform drops ¹². The Reading Ape describes the Hic et Nunc piece as the same algorithm "tweaked to become an animation instead of a still" ¹³.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 17,130 bytes, SHA-256 a6b6984e0fc0ceb54c6d7299df93e86b927031f788877a773097ba93fab2b3f1. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full ¹. The script contains no trait names: the labels are computed elsewhere by Art Blocks. To connect the two, I ran the script's set-up stage for all 650 hashes in Node.js and compared the internal switches with the published traits. Every trait maps exactly onto a program variable or a simple rule ¹.

The main stages are these (code reading, confirmed by the artist's technical essay where noted) ¹⁸:

• Seeding. The token hash is turned into bytes and hashed twice with MurmurHash2, giving a 64-bit state for the program's own random generator. A simplex-noise permutation table is shuffled from the same generator, so every token has its own noise field.
• Terrain. Height comes from six octaves of simplex noise, shaped by one of several parameter sets. The artist describes this as a single parametric function returning a 3D point for each surface coordinate ⁸.
• Patches. Unless the surface is left whole, it is cut into rectangles by recursive binary partition, four to six levels deep. Each patch can have its own colour, stroke length and stroke spacing ⁷.
• Strokes. Start points are laid out by Poisson-disc sampling, or on a regular grid for Grid outputs. Each stroke then follows a noise-driven flow field across the surface ⁸.
• Projection and hidden lines. Strokes are projected through a fixed isometric camera. Any stroke point on a back-facing triangle, or hidden behind a nearer slope, is removed by ray casting against a 42 by 42 grid mesh ⁸.
• Colour. Procedural colours are picked in the OKLab colour space. They are filtered by a WCAG contrast test against the background, trying ratios of 3, then 2.5, then 2 ⁸.

Style. The Style trait is the colour mode, one of eleven weighted choices, overridden by Starfall 1 per cent of the time. The table compares the program's weights with the published counts.

The named palettes belong only to Pencil (Acid 40, Ballpoint 37, Peppermint 31, Memphis 27, Lime 25) and Acrylic (twelve palettes from Midnight, 20, down to Highlighter, 8). Every other style has the palette label Procedural, 332 outputs in all ¹.

Landscape and surface. The other switches are drawn at fixed rates (code reading), and the counts follow ¹:

• Summit (33): 5 per cent; a radial mask raises one central peak.
• Coast (38) and Waterfall (4): 7.5 per cent of non-Summit outputs are coastal, and a fifth of those become Waterfalls, with a steeper edge and a stretched tile.
• Hills (45): on three-quarters of eligible outputs, the program chooses among seven terrain settings; on the other quarter, four gentler "Hills" settings join the pool.
• Patchwork False (180): 25 per cent of non-Starfall outputs are left as a single patch (159 here); the other 21 are Stippled cases explained in quirk 7.
• Grid (57): 10 per cent. Stippled (53): 10 per cent, not with Metallic or Drift. Lattice (59): 10 per cent, not with Starfall or Metallic.
• Brushed (122): a 33 per cent chance, only on eligible outputs, of jittering stroke starts along the flow.
• Blended (106): a 30 per cent chance, when there are at least two colours, of colouring strokes by a light-shaded gradient through the palette.
• River (32) and Wireframe (17): 10 and 5 per cent, each on a narrow set of eligible outputs.

Quirks in the algorithm

1. The flat coastal shelf. In the coastal branch, a ternary expression is read as "height plus the Waterfall flag", instead of adding one of two offsets to the height. As written, the land side of every Coast and Waterfall is set to a constant level, not raised terrain (code reading) ¹. The renders of #0, #25 and #468 show exactly this: a flat, lightly marked plateau ending in a cliff. Whether the flat shelf was intended cannot be told from the code.
2. Twelve Acrylic palettes, not thirteen. The traits essay says Acrylic "selects one of 13 palettes" ⁷. The program defines twelve, and all twelve appear among the 158 Acrylics ¹.
3. Metallic is always blended, but never labelled so. Metallic forces the blended-colour switch on in the code, and all 28 Metallics use it in emulation. None carries Blended = True ¹. The artist describes Metallic's "diffuse point lighting", the same light-shaded blend he gives for the Blended trait ⁷.
4. Wireframe ignores three of its own labels. Wireframe patches are drawn as a plain quad mesh in one colour. The stroke options (Brushed, Grid and Blended) are never applied to them (code reading). Six of the 17 Wireframes are still labelled Brushed, including #349, two Grid and one Blended ¹.
5. The Lattice coin. A coin is drawn at set-up and used only once: for Lattice outputs, it skips the back-face test before the occlusion ray cast. It applies to 24 of the 59 Lattices in emulation (code reading) ¹. This is probably the 50 per cent "holes" bug the artist chose to keep, but that link is an inference ⁷. All four outputs he singled out as looking like "data errors" or "a different rendering algorithm", #80, #468, #521 and #621, are Lattices ⁷¹.
6. A random test that always passes. One branch adds three extra terrain settings only if a random draw falls below 1, which always happens. The draw still consumes a number from the generator, and the settings are skipped only for Summit and Metallic (code reading) ¹.
7. Patchwork means different things for stipple. For line outputs, Patchwork records whether the surface was subdivided. For Stippled outputs it also needs visible colour change. Of the 41 subdivided Stippled outputs, the 21 with a single colour or a blend are labelled Patchwork False ¹.
8. Rules in the published data. Stippled never occurs with Brushed, River or Wireframe. Lattice never occurs with Brushed, River or Wireframe. Pencil and Drift are never Brushed, Pencil is never Wireframe, and Metallic and Drift are never Stippled. The four Waterfalls are one each of Acrylic, Drift, Riso and Screenprint ¹.
9. Resolution and behaviour. The canvas fills the browser window at the device's pixel ratio and redraws on resize. The terrain stays a centred square. There is no animation or input, and without token data the script invents a random hash (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

DesLauriers expected rarity to come from more than the traits: "the most rare outputs will not be based on the coded attributes alone" ¹¹. The collecting record is modest next to his later Meridian, which had two lots in Phillips' 2022 "Ex-Machina" sale when Subscapes had none ¹⁴.

At auction. Two Subscapes were sold at Sotheby's New York in "Grails: Property from an Iconic Digital Art Collection Part II", which closed on 15 June 2023. They were lot 28, #198, and lot 29, #263, each estimated at $5,000 to $7,000 ¹⁵¹⁶. Artnet identified the collection as that of the bankrupt hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. It singled out the Subscapes as works that "conjure the contours of possible geographies in fine brushwork" ¹⁷. The prices realised are behind a login, and Artnet's report of the $10.99 million sale does not mention them ¹⁸. In the index #198 is a Neon, and #263 is an Invert with Lattice ¹. VERSE's market panel gave a highest recorded sale of $42,930, without a token number, and a total volume of $2,321,363 at retrieval ¹⁹.

Starfall (6) and Waterfall (4). The artist names these as the two rarest traits, with Waterfall "even rarer than Starfall" ⁷. The Starfalls are #196, #377, #464, #506, #524 and #606, and #196 is also the only Starfall Summit. The Waterfalls are #25, #80, #115 and #215 ¹.

The artist's outliers. DesLauriers picked out #210 for "an unexpected Moiré pattern", and #80, #468, #521 and #621 as glitch-like ⁷. #80 is also a Waterfall, in Drift, which makes it the only output that is both a Waterfall and a Lattice ¹.

Wireframes (17). At 2.6 per cent, Wireframe is the rarest structural trait. It shows the underlying geometry directly ⁷¹. AB5D's #349 is one of five Acrylic Wireframes and the only one in Spring ¹.

Palettes. The rarest named palettes are Highlighter (8), Campgrounds (11) and Pop (11) ¹.

Notable collectors

Le Random, the generative-art collection, lists Subscapes #438 as acquired on 20 March 2023. It describes it as "a rising cliffside that cascades into the underlying river", one of "the rarer variations" ²⁰. In the index #438 is a Hills landscape with River, in the Midnight palette, and Blended ¹.

At retrieval the 650 tokens were held by 308 addresses. Of these, 221 held a single token and the largest held 45. No source inspected names the largest holders ¹. AB5D holds #349 ¹.

Prints

DesLauriers runs a token-gated print programme. Each print is 18 by 18 inches, "archival-quality", "limited edition, artist signed", and priced at $205 plus shipping ²¹. Only the holder of a token can order its print, one per token, and a new owner becomes eligible after a sale ²¹. Payment is accepted in crypto or by card ²¹. The page does not publish a ledger of printed tokens, so the printed share of the edition is unknown.

The public GitHub repository offers a command-line tool that renders any iteration as PNG, JPG or SVG at a chosen resolution, which supports plotter and print output ²². The artist also published a starter template for small Art Blocks programs ²³.

The mint

The index records activation on 22 April 2021 at 13:18:43 UTC. Invocation 0 was minted at 13:35:54 UTC that day ¹. The print page calls #0 "artist-minted" ²¹. The public release began on 23 April at 17:01:03 UTC. The other 649 tokens were minted in 7 minutes 24 seconds, the last at 17:08:27 UTC: 106 in the first minute and 204 in the second (my computation from the index) ¹. The indexed price is 0.17 ETH ¹. DesLauriers wrote that all 650 "sold out within 8 minutes". Eleven days later, he added, 268 tokens had traded on OpenSea for 289.41 ETH, then $977,962 ³. At retrieval the lowest listing was 1.6 ETH ¹.

DesLauriers says part of the proceeds went to three carbon-offset projects, in Brazil, Belize and Honduras, bought through Offsetra, and part to arts non-profits including the Processing Foundation ³.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 without a link ¹. The GitHub repository is MIT-licensed for its tools, and it places generated PNG, JPG and SVG files under CC BY-NC 4.0 ²². Its rights statement adds: "Neither of these licenses covers the code for the Subscapes generative algorithm". DesLauriers explains this as a way to keep his artistic IP and stop others claiming rights over new iterations ²². The on-chain script can be read by anyone, but reading it grants no licence. The essay above describes it without reproducing it. The print mock-up belongs to the artist's studio; it is linked, not re-hosted.

Significance and limitations

Subscapes is an early Curated project from April 2021 and the first of DesLauriers's two Art Blocks landscape systems. It is unusual in having the artist's own detailed notes on its traits and technique ³⁷⁸. Its 17 KB program fits a 3D renderer, hidden-line removal, OKLab palettes and contrast checks. Its quirks, from the flat coastal shelf to the kept Lattice bug, show a system tuned under deadline ¹⁷. The collecting record is thin: two Sotheby's lots with undisclosed results, one institutional holder, and a print programme without a public ledger.

Unresolved research questions:

1. How many Subscapes prints have been made, and for which tokens?
2. Is the flat coastal shelf intended? A re-render of #0 with the offset added to the height would show the difference.
3. Did the artist count a thirteenth Acrylic palette that was dropped before release, or is "13" a slip? The quotation came from an automated extraction and should be checked against the post.
4. Does the Hic et Nunc companion animation survive, and under what token and edition size? Its object number was not found.
5. What did lots 28 and 29 fetch at Sotheby's, and which token made the $42,930 sale VERSE records? The artist's release announcement on X (April 2021) is a further lead that could not be fetched.

Bibliography