Symbol 1

The work and its context

Symbol 1 is project 411 on the Art Blocks contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, in the Presents vertical. The index records 153 invocations against a maximum of 153, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 1.25 (5:4) and the licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ¹. Art Blocks lists it as an AB500 release in the Presents category, released on 3 February 2023 ².

The premise is a single, clear conceit. In the artist's words, "each mark on the digital canvas is made by text of the algorithm that created it" ¹. The mint text compares the work to an oil painting: look closely at a painting and you see brushstrokes; look closely at Symbol 1 and you see "text from for() loops repeated over and over", the Random() function "weaving through the piece", and the hash "like an artist signature" at the bottom right ¹.

Each output is a cluster of translucent, splintered wedges on a cream ground. Every wedge is built from thousands of lines of typeset code, stacked so densely that they read as tone. Up close the texture dissolves back into characters ¹³.

The title comes from George Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847). For Boole, the project text explains, "symbol 1" stands for "the Universe comprehending every conceivable class of objects, whether actually existing or not" ¹. The text places the work in a long argument between the organic and the mechanical, from art nouveau against art deco to Pollock's "I am nature" against Warhol's "I want to be a machine" ¹.

Conception and development

Emily Weil is a New York-based digital artist. Her studio site describes a practice built on code, drawing on "backgrounds in art, technology, and economics" ⁴. Before Symbol 1 she made interactive and video installations for retail, hospitality and museum settings. These include Tweed, an interactive installation for Chanel in Beverly Hills and Hong Kong; Plunge, a video collage at Novotel Times Square; and Platform 1 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image ⁴. Her press page lists earlier, pre-NFT work at Ars Electronica in Linz and at The Interaction show in Gifu, Japan ⁵. The site credits a single accident with starting her generative practice: code "left running on a monitor while I stepped out for a sandwich" produced a composition she had not planned ⁴.

Weil's own project page for Symbol 1 sets out its vocabulary. It describes six brushstrokes, "three rectilinear and three curved (Bezier)", and a layout "based on a grid, a ubiquitous organizing structure in generative art". Each grid cell receives brushstrokes and is then rotated by a random angle ³. Each palette pairs a dominant saturated colour with a desaturated version of it, plus a highlight colour that sets the two apart ³. The page also hosts a live generator ³. Her studio post announcing the release puts the idea in one line: "Computer code is everywhere, often hidden. 'Symbol 1' makes it visible" ⁶.

Weil discussed the project on Art Blocks' After Dinner Mints in March 2023. Apple Podcasts dates the episode 21 March 2023 and gives it a running time of 33 minutes ⁷. The YouTube copy is titled "Episode 73: Art Blocks After Dinner Mints w/ Emily Weil", on the Art Blocks Official channel ⁸. The episode listing links her X account and linktree, and her recommendations for collectors, including the documentaries Herb & Dorothy 50x50 and Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict ⁷.

How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that together come to 31,475 bytes, SHA-256 114de55d1715c3361131fdaa8bb7c9d1d4918294761b3f1f948e3c4935dab46c. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full. It is minified, and no code is reproduced here beyond a few words ¹.

The program seeds two sfc32 generators from the two halves of the token hash. It burns 500,000 values from each, then alternates between them ¹. A single "compose" step then draws, in order, a layout, a background grid, a palette and a font. A Python re-implementation of that generator and those four draws reproduces the published Composition, Grid, Palette and Font of all 153 tokens, with no mismatches (own computation) ¹.

The drawing is made on an offscreen canvas and scaled onto the visible one inside a thin margin. Every brush writes strings of code with p5's text function: rows of loop code for the three rectangular brushes, and code laid along Bezier curves for the curved brush, whose three curve shapes make up the "three curved" strokes Weil describes ¹³.

Expected counts: own computation from the code. Published counts: index ¹.

The layouts map to the trait names as follows (own computation, matched across all 153 tokens) ¹:

• singleB is a single rotated cluster of 7 to 12 layered wedge groups.
• singleA is a single cluster of 10 to 15 smaller groups.
• fullWidth fills the canvas with two or three bands of wide, rotated strokes. It also adds a coloured backdrop drawn in one of the palette colours.
• multipleA scatters 20 to 30 small clusters, locked to right-angle orientations, then adds a central singleA-style cluster.
• multipleB scatters 10 to 15 small spiky clusters, then adds the same central cluster.
• multipleC combines both kinds of scattered cluster and has no central cluster at all.

The ground is always the same warm cream. The strokes take the palette colours, while the Random() line, the grid characters and the hash are always black ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 153 token records, turned up the following. Points that rest on the code alone are marked as code reading.

1. The code is written backwards. The brushes lay each string down one character at a time, taking characters from the end of the string first. The code therefore reads in reverse along every stroke (code reading) ¹. The high-resolution render of #73 confirms this: fragments such as "this.y_end+(h" appear as "ht(+dne_y.siht" (own observation) ¹.
2. The "code" is a paraphrase of the code. The for() loops shown in the strokes are readable strings stored inside the program, not the program's own running lines. The on-chain script is minified. Names such as y_shift_counter occur only inside those quoted strings, seven times, and never as live code ¹. One string uses bare names like y_start where another uses this.y_start, which suggests they were copied from different drafts (code reading) ¹. The mint text's claim that the marks are "text of the algorithm" holds in spirit rather than letter ¹.
3. A typo in the displayed Random() function. The Random class is stored as a string for the curving "Random() function" line, and one statement in it is missing its variable name. The running generator has the correct statement. So when a token's 50-character excerpt happens to include that spot, the art shows a line of code that would not run (code reading) ¹.
4. Only the end of the hash is legible. The hash "signature" is drawn from its last character leftwards, fading by about 0.043 in opacity per character. It reaches zero after roughly 23 characters (own computation). What reads as a signature is the tail of the hash. The 0x prefix and the leading characters are never visible. The letter spacing also widens by 1.9 per cent per character as it moves left ¹.
5. An unreachable text style. The code defines three styles for the Random() line, but a flag that can only be 0 or 1 selects among them. The third style, a line that fades in and out, can never be drawn (code reading) ¹. On the singleB, singleA and one of the two fullWidth layouts, the Random() line is drawn twice, once beneath the strokes and once above them ¹.
6. fullWidth hides two variants. Layouts 2 and 3 both call the same full-width drawing routine and share the fullWidth label. They differ only in that layout 2 draws the Random() line twice. The split is 24 and 25 tokens; #0 is a layout 2 and #11 a layout 3 (own computation) ¹.
7. Palettes that never appear, and names used twice. Of the 61 palette entries, the two grey palettes are each entered three times, which triples their odds. Another name, mediumBlueDarkGreenMediumGreen, labels two different colour sets: #1, #38 and #53 use one, and #58 and #102 the other (own computation) ¹. Four named palettes are in the code but in no token: darkBlueMediumBlueDarkCharcoal, darkRoseMediumRoseDarkBlue, darkTurquoiseMediumTurquoiseGreen and darkYellowMediumYellowDarkRed ¹.
8. Greys cluster on fullWidth. The six grey entries fall in the range that fullWidth is restricted to. That gives a grey palette a 22 per cent chance on fullWidth, against about 10 per cent elsewhere. In the data, 12 of the 20 grey outputs are fullWidth (own computation) ¹.
9. Rules that hold across the edition. No fullWidth or singleB output ever has a grid, and no fullWidth output uses any of the first 34 palettes ¹. The trait value "asterick" is misspelt in the program and therefore in the metadata ¹.
10. Fonts are named, not loaded. The seven fonts are requested by name from the viewer's system rather than bundled. On a machine without, say, Garamond or Tahoma, the browser substitutes a default face, and the Font trait will not match what is seen (code reading) ¹.
11. Dead draws and a duplicate parameter. Several random values are drawn and thrown away. For example, a colour is picked for the background band and then overwritten with a fixed cream on every layout except fullWidth. A one-pass loop, and branches for larger cluster sizes that no call reaches, point to trimmed-back options. One helper also declares the same parameter name twice, which only works in non-strict JavaScript (code reading) ¹.
12. Window-dependent canvas. The offscreen canvas is sized to the browser window, rounded up to the next hundred pixels, and redrawn on resize. Sizes are relative, so the composition should hold across screens, but this was not tested at other sizes. The Art Blocks renders are 2,400 by 1,920 pixels (code reading; own observation) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No source inspected names grails, nicknamed tokens or collector sets for Symbol 1, and no auction-house sale was found. The market has been quiet. VERSE's series page gave total sales volume of $10,470 and a highest sale of $473 at retrieval ⁹. The index's lowest listing was 0.39999 ETH, and Art Blocks showed two listings from 0.40 ETH ¹².

In the absence of collector lore, the code and data point to the structurally scarce outputs (own computation) ¹:

• Single-palette tokens. Thirteen palettes appear once each: #11, #35, #40, #51, #81, #91, #103, #110, #114, #122, #129, #142 and #149.
• Dot grids (11 of 153). These are the rarest grid: #5, #10, #22, #45, #57, #64, #89, #95, #113, #139 and #148. A dot grid needs a scattered or singleA layout, then a 1-in-2 grid chance, then a 1-in-3 choice.
• Grey palettes (20). These are the monochrome outputs where the text texture is easiest to read. They are most common on fullWidth, as with invocation 0.
• multipleC (21). This is the only layout without a central cluster, so the canvas is a field of scattered splinters.

With only 153 outputs and a few hundred possible trait combinations, ten pairs share all four traits, among them #0 and #28 (own computation) ¹.

At retrieval the 153 tokens were held by 121 addresses. The largest wallet held 13, including a consecutive run from #18 to #26; no source ties it to a named collector ¹. VERSE reported 123 owners ⁹. The artist's address held none ¹. AB5D holds #73 ¹.

Symbol 1 on display

Weil's press page records that "Symbol 1 was displayed at On Water, a group show at 0x.17 NFT Gallery in March 2023" ⁵. The Seaport's own listing describes On Water as a show of 26 New York digital artists at the 0x.17 Gallery, Pier 17, 89 South Street, curated by Emily Edelman and running until 6 April 2023. That listing does not name Weil ¹⁰. No prints, plotter works or other physical editions of Symbol 1 were found. Weil also reports taking part in the sixth cohort of the VerticalCrypto Art residency ⁵.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 19 January 2023 at 21:45:11 UTC, the day before the index records activation ¹. The public sale used Art Blocks' exponential Dutch auction minter (MinterDAExpV2). It opened on 3 February 2023 at 18:00 UTC at 8 ETH, with a half-life of 314 seconds and a resting price of 0.15 ETH, which the curve reached at 18:30:21 UTC ¹. A set-price minter at 0.15 ETH was also configured for the project ¹.

The first public token, #1, was minted at 18:26:35 UTC. By the auction's decay formula that is about 0.24 ETH. Twelve more followed before the curve bottomed out, the last at about 0.154 ETH (own computation from the auction parameters; actual prices paid not verified) ¹. The sale then slowed. Eighty-three tokens had been minted by 19:00 UTC, 96 within 24 hours, 123 within a week and 138 by the end of February. The last, #152, was minted on 9 August 2023 ¹. The index records the project as completed on 7 March 2024, seven months after the last mint ¹.

The project pledged "10% of proceeds above the auction's resting price" to Girls Who Code ¹. Because only thirteen tokens sold above the resting price, the curve implies a total premium of roughly 0.37 ETH. That would make the pledged donation about 0.04 ETH (own computation) ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, linked to the Creative Commons deed ¹. Under that licence the images may be shared non-commercially with attribution, but not adapted. That "no derivatives" term sits a little awkwardly with a work whose marks are its own source text: quoting the code in a new work would itself be an adaptation. The program carries no separate code licence, and p5.js is loaded by the platform at view time ¹. The renders shown here come from the Art Blocks media proxy.

Significance and limitations

Symbol 1 makes a single idea legible. The brushstroke is replaced by the program's own text, and the Boolean "universe" of the title becomes a field of loops and random calls. The code shows the conceit is looser than the mint text implies. The text in the strokes is a stored paraphrase, written in reverse, with a typo in the displayed generator. The hash "signature" shows only its last twenty-odd characters ¹. Those gaps are part of what the work is, and the essay records them rather than treating them as faults. Market attention has been slight, and there is no established collector vocabulary for the series ⁹.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What did Weil say about the backwards text and the paraphrased code strings on After Dinner Mints (episode 73)? The episode was identified but not transcribed for this draft ⁷⁸.
2. Why is the edition 153, and why does the index record completion on 7 March 2024, seven months after the last mint? The answer may lie in a change to the maximum invocations on the contract.
3. What was the Girls Who Code donation, and which of the thirteen above-resting-price mints actually went through the Dutch auction minter?
4. Which Symbol 1 outputs were shown at On Water, and in what form? Weil's X account (@emilyaweil) and the 0x.17 Gallery's posts are leads that could not be read here.
5. What were the Art Blocks interview and the Women's Wear Daily feature listed on Weil's press page? Their links could not be extracted ⁵. Quotations from the studio pages came from automated extraction and should be checked against the live pages.

Bibliography