The Harvest

The work and its context

The Harvest is project 407 on the Art Blocks contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. The index records 400 invocations against a maximum of 400, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 0.8 (4:5), and the licence CC BY-NC 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹. Art Blocks lists it as a Curated release within the Art Blocks 500 ².

The project text opens with a myth: "The Caretaker awakes. After a millennia of slumber it must again usher its minions into the expanse." Each output shows one of the worlds the Caretaker tends, struck by "monumental chromatic beams" that "extract the much needed nectar" ¹. Stoveland names two visual sources: a "cathedral-like atmosphere in the vein of Hugh Ferriss", and Michael Whelan's landscapes ¹.

In practice each image is a steep, engraved-looking terrain seen from above at an angle. Vertical bars of colour run from the top of the frame down into it, and each bar throws a spray of coloured dust where it lands.

Per Kristian Stoveland was born in 1978 in Bærum, Norway, and works in Oslo. He studied at the Oslo School of Graphic Design and co-founded the design studio Void in 2015 ². nft now reports that he spent part of his childhood in Kenya and Zimbabwe, where his father oversaw Norwegian aid plans for water development ³. That detail connects to the project's charity note: 25 per cent of proceeds above the resting price were pledged to a rainwater project at Kwa Mutisya Primary School in Kenya ¹.

Conception and development

Before The Harvest, Stoveland released generative work on fx(hash), KnownOrigin and Foundation from 2021 onwards. His project list places The Harvest in 2023, followed that year by Blaatimen (Proof Grails IV), Pursuit and Echo of Intensity, and in 2024 by the two Keepsakes collections and the Opepen set "Harvepen" ⁴.

In the Art Blocks interview with Jordan Kantor, he said the work reversed his usual method: "the story came first, and was directing the visuals instead" ⁵. It began while he was building landscapes from 3D primitives. His interest in tabletop role-playing games is about "the storytelling and world-building" rather than the play itself ⁵. He called it the point where his fascination with physics, space and science fiction "meets my art practice for the first time" ⁵. At one point he had to "put it away for a while due to frustration" ⁵. Blending colour where beams meet was the hard part. A summary on digitalart.io attributes to him the line that the challenge was "making them intersect naturally without overriding each other when they crossed paths" ⁶.

A Catalyst podcast write-up from NTT Data says the work "came to life when Per experimented with a landscape algorithm featuring a single beam of light" ⁷. He told nft now that he had always planned to write a science fiction book in retirement, "maybe I can do it through [visual] art instead" ³. The palette names, he said, hide sci-fi references for viewers to find ⁵. Among them are Nostromo and Sulaco, Arrakis, Trantor and Terminus, Serenity and Moya ¹³.

How the work was constructed

The program is three script parts totalling 21,889 bytes, SHA-256 30b638bd514ccb97b0ddabe36b05aa10ee3c05ce168df89541f6f80ba41c96c2. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full; no code is reproduced here ¹. To test the trait logic, the parameter and harvester stages were re-run for all 400 token hashes in Node.js, with the drawing stubbed out. Every one of the 12 published traits was reproduced exactly for every token (own computation) ¹.

Randomness. The program splits the token hash into two halves and seeds a small 128-bit generator (the sfc32 design) from each. It burns half a million draws from each stream and then alternates between them. One draw goes to the noise seed, and the rest decide everything else ¹.

The world. The ground is a 500 by 500 grid of thin vertical boxes, 250,000 in all, viewed through an orthographic WEBGL camera ¹. Five topography types shape it with Perlin noise at different frequencies: Grooved, Mountainous, Volcanic, Layered and Slated. Elevation (Low or High) scales the relief. Feature adds a diagonal Ridge or Valley across the terrain, and a Valley also tilts the camera more steeply. Twelve Surface treatments then roughen it; "Untouched" is simply the option with no treatment ¹.

The beams. A beam is a single box stretched by 10,000 units, so it runs out of the top of the frame. It digs a small sink-hole where it lands ¹. Reach sets how far its colour spreads along the grid rows and columns around it. "Mixed" gives each beam its own random reach. Yield sets the length of the plume of tiny coloured cubes that rises from the impact ¹. Where the colour bands of neighbouring beams overlap, the program blends them in a graded margin. That is the intersection problem Stoveland described ¹⁶.

The formations. The Harvester trait sets how the beams are arranged (code reading) ¹:

• Miner: one compact grid. A single-beam Miner has a 70 per cent chance of drawing each beam as a thick bundle.
• Squadron: several small grids strung out across the ground.
• Array: one wide, sparse grid.
• Barge: one dense block of 6 to 9 beams on each side.
• Drones: no formation at all; 15 to 25 lone beams scattered at random.

Support Drones adds loose beams on top of the formation: 1 to 3 for Few, and 20 to 25 for Many. Alignment sets how a grid is laid out: Synchronized (square), Alternated (offset rows) or Spread (skewed) ¹.

Published counts track the program's weights.

The 19 palettes are picked with a skewed draw that favours the first entries. Serenity, a cream ground with eleven accent colours, is the most common. Five palettes have a single accent colour: Thoth, Nostromo, Sulaco, Amarr and Firespray, 87 tokens in all ¹. Moya is the rarest palette in the published data, with seven tokens (#7, #60, #80, #178, #246, #291, #304). Its program weight, 3.3 per cent, is no lower than several others, so its rarity is largely the luck of 400 draws (own computation) ¹.

Drawing over time. The first 3 to 10 frames lay down the background: hatched lines, straight or sine-waved. The landscape then draws 200 boxes per frame, row by row. That is 1,250 frames, after which the loop stops ¹. There is no interactivity.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against the 400 published token records and a re-run of the parameter stage, found the following.

1. Atmosphere is the sky, not the ground. The Atmosphere trait comes entirely from how the background is hatched: sine-waved or straight lines, drawn by one of two methods. Calm, Windy, Hazy and Turbulent are the four combinations, and the mapping holds for all 400 tokens (own computation) ¹.
2. A range helper that overshoots. The helper for skewed integers adds its lower bound but still multiplies by the full upper bound. So a call meant to give 2 to 5 actually gives 2 to 7. Squadrons were meant to have at most five clusters, yet 12 of the 67 have six or seven (own computation) ¹. Thick beam bundles meant to be at most 4 by 4 reach 6 by 6, and 120 tokens contain at least one 6-by-6 bundle (own computation) ¹.
3. Two switches that never turn on. An accent-shuffle and an off-centre shift for the main formation are both gated on a probability of zero. Neither can happen, although each still uses up a random draw (code reading) ¹.
4. A jitter that is always on. The angle of the Ridge or Valley is meant to get a random nudge half the time. The condition calls the decimal generator with an argument it ignores, and that returns a non-zero number almost every time. So the nudge is effectively always applied (code reading) ¹.
5. Forty-five degrees that became 57. For the Leylines and Fissures surfaces (73 tokens), the line pattern is meant to be rotated by plus or minus 45 degrees two-thirds of the time. Operator precedence turns that into a rotation of plus or minus 1 radian, about 57 degrees (code reading) ¹.
6. Placeholder ranges. Several random calls draw from a range whose two ends are equal, such as 0.3 to 0.3 or 230 to 230. They return constants but still advance the generator (code reading) ¹.
7. Rules found in the data.
8. All 45 Drones are "Random" in Alignment, and Random occurs nowhere else.
9. The 87 single-accent tokens are always Synchronized unless they are Drones (77 and 10).
10. Thoth is the only palette whose frame colour differs from its ground: a light cream border around a darker cream field, on all 29 Thoth tokens ¹.
11. Unused helpers. An easing function and a y-range function are never called. The y-range function also starts its maximum from JavaScript's smallest positive number rather than the most negative one. A map helper ignores its argument (code reading) ¹.
12. A wide range of beam counts. The re-run counts the unit beams after duplicates and out-of-bounds positions are removed, with bundles counted beam by beam. The range runs from 1 (#377) to 385 (#172), with a median of 65 (own computation) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No auction record, sale ranking or published grail list for The Harvest was found. The collecting evidence below is thinner than for older Curated projects.

Single-colour palettes. In February 2023, nft now wrote that Nostromo and Sulaco "tend to trade hands consistently at double the collection's floor price" ³. Both are among the five single-accent palettes ¹. Nostromo is cream beams on near-black; Sulaco is dark on cream. Invocation 0 is a Nostromo Drones output: loose, bone-white beams over a grey mountain range ¹.

Very few or very many beams. Stoveland said that "the outputs that have either very few or very many beams stood out the most" ⁵. At the sparse end, #377 is the only output with a single beam: one amber line, tilted by the Angled camera, landing in a navy Amarr valley ¹. It echoes the single-beam origin story ⁷. Twelve more tokens have ten or fewer unit beams, among them #358, #277 and #51 (own computation) ¹.

At the dense end, six tokens have 250 or more unit beams. Five of them are Squadrons; #172 has the most, at 385 ¹. #379, an Amarr Squadron with Many support drones, is almost entirely amber.

Moya. Moya is the rarest palette by count (seven tokens): a gradient of oranges on near-black ¹. #7 shows a single orange formation lighting a dark ridge.

Notable collectors. None of the sources inspected names a collector or institution for The Harvest. At retrieval the 400 tokens were held by 268 addresses; the largest wallet held 11 and the next held 7. No source ties these wallets to a named owner ¹. AB5D holds #187. That token changed wallets five times in the nine hours after it was minted at 18:17:47 UTC on 18 January 2023. The last of those wallets held it until 15 December 2025, when it passed through one more wallet into AB5D's that evening ¹. The index records transfers, not prices, so it does not show which of these moves were sales.

The Harvest in print

Stoveland runs his own print programme. nft now reported in 2023 that he was offering "signed physical prints" to all holders ³. His site gives the terms. Buyers "need to prove ownership of the NFT at the time of purchase", and "there can be only one print per edition" ⁸. Three sizes are offered: 48 × 60 cm (€550), 80 × 100 cm (€675) and 104 × 130 cm (€825), each plus €130 for insured DHL shipping ⁸. They are made with "a local Certified Hähnemuhle Studio", hand-signed, and come with a certificate of authenticity ⁸. His Linktree also links a "Harvest Print Project" with The Disruptive Gallery ⁹.

How many remain unprinted. The print page lists all 400 mints as Available, Unavailable or Pending. Read on 20 September 2026, it showed 53 marked Unavailable (printed) and 347 Available, with none pending ⁸. That is about 13 per cent printed. The printed numbers include #14, #16, #195 and #393. #0, #7, #172, #187 and #377 are all unprinted, as is every Moya ⁸¹. Of the Nostromo and Sulaco tokens, only #27 has been printed ⁸¹. These counts came from an automated reading of the page and should be checked by hand.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 4 January 2023 at 22:18:47 UTC, two weeks before the public sale, through a separate minter configuration ¹. The project was activated on 12 January. The public sale was an exponential Dutch auction on Art Blocks' MinterDAExpV2. It opened at 18:00 UTC on 18 January, starting at 10 ETH and halving every 638 seconds towards a resting price of 0.2 ETH ¹.

Nobody bought for almost 11 minutes. The first public mint landed at 18:10:59 UTC. Then 297 tokens were minted in the single minute from 18:17, and the edition closed at 18:17:59 ¹. Applying the minter's price curve to each mint time, the first buyer paid about 4.92 ETH and the last about 3.27 ETH. The 399 public mints come to roughly 1,400 ETH, an average of about 3.5 ETH each (own computation from the index's minter settings and mint times) ¹. The auction therefore ended far above the resting price.

Trading was heavy from the start. The index records 1,812 transfers other than mints, 220 of them on launch day. It also shows 15 tokens that have never left the wallet that minted them ¹. By February 2023 nft now gave a floor of 7 ETH and more than 2,684 ETH of secondary volume ³. Verse's page, read in September 2026, shows a highest sale of $67,198 and total volume of $7,182,534 ¹⁰. The lowest listing in the index at retrieval was 0.449 ETH ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 and links the Creative Commons deed ¹¹¹. Under that licence, the images may be shared and adapted for non-commercial purposes with attribution; commercial use needs the artist's permission. The artist's own print programme is the authorised route to a physical work ⁸. The program carries no separate code licence. p5.js is supplied by the platform at view time ¹.

Significance and limitations

The Harvest marks the point where Stoveland, by his own account, moved from exploring a system to building a world ⁵. The code carries that story in its trait names, and the marks of hand-tuning in its quirks ¹. The mint was one of the stronger results of early 2023: the auction ended at more than 16 times its resting price, and a charity pledge was attached ¹. The print programme publishes a public ledger, with most of the edition still unprinted ⁸.

Unresolved research questions:

1. How much was donated to the Kwa Mutisya Primary School water project, and when? No report of the donation was found.
2. Which token and date lie behind Verse's $67,198 top sale, and has any Harvest been sold at auction? Stoveland's X account (@perkwerk_) and the Proof podcast, which could not be fetched, are the leads.
3. The Disruptive Gallery's "Harvest Print Project" page, the photographs on the print page, and WEN Tokyo's "Reaching for the Future" page could not be fetched (permission not granted). Do they show physical prints or an exhibition of The Harvest?
4. The print ledger count (53 printed) and the quote attributed to Stoveland on digitalart.io both come from automated page extraction. Both need checking by hand.
5. The brief for this essay mentioned works called Glow and Dust. No source consulted, including Stoveland's own project list, connects him to either, so they are left out.

Bibliography