The Liths of Sisyphus

The world turns around a stone circle

A small human figure stands near stones arranged in circles. Fine lines spread across the surrounding ground, sometimes meeting in stars or overlapping loops. Beyond the carefully ordered centre, the terrain rises and falls like dunes, hills or the walls of a basin. The scene slowly turns. What initially seems to be an illustration becomes a place that can be watched from changing directions.¹²³

The Liths of Sisyphus is a 777-work Art Blocks Factory collection by nonfigurativ, the artist Bjørn Staal. The official description imagines Sisyphus making works from rocks and trenches, subject to the changing decisions of the gods. Its questions concern freedom, labour and whether the maker can ever find peace.⁴ The artist dossier supplies wider context for Staal's practice; here the emphasis is on how the series gives those questions a spatial form.

The scale relationship is crucial. Without the figure, the circles might look like tabletop models or tiny instruments. With it, individual stones become heavy objects, and the surrounding land becomes a place one could cross. Yet the elevated, steadily turning view withholds the position of an ordinary pedestrian. The viewer surveys the labour from above while the figure remains contained within its world.

An experiment in returning to JavaScript

In the transcript of a June 2024 Waiting To Be Signed interview, Staal recalls encountering Art Blocks after becoming interested in NFTs in early 2021. He describes The Liths of Sisyphus as an experiment in understanding the platform and returning to JavaScript after years away. The attraction included storing the program on-chain, and he remembers waiting several months for review.⁵

That retrospective account places the project within a longer technical practice. In the same interview, he describes learning through Flash and ActionScript, working in Oslo design studios and helping establish Void in 2015. His installation work used programming to connect visual experiences with physical spaces.⁵ The transcript was read rather than checked against the full audio, and it misspells the collection title as “Lifts”; the exact title is established by the project record.

The project statement provides a narrative frame, but the available material does not establish when that story entered development or which prototype produced the final composition. It would be premature to turn the imagined labour of Sisyphus into a literal account of the artist's working conditions. The code shows the operations; the statement gives them a mythic setting. Their relationship remains interpretive.

There is, however, a specific account of the work's effect on another artist. In a January 2023 Art Blocks interview, Per Kristian Stoveland recalls that seeing his friend Bjørn release this project rekindled his own interest in generative art and blockchain. He describes that close view of the release as a catalyst for resuming his practice.⁶ This is useful evidence of influence at the level of artistic activity, without requiring a claim that later works borrowed the stone-circle algorithm.

Geometry beneath the atmosphere

The complete indexed program contains 16,721 UTF-8 bytes and uses three@0.124.0. The exact script was retrieved from the official index, read in full and hashed. Contract and project number 124 were checked independently of the collection's position in the AB500 list. The retrieval is not a direct extraction from a specified historical chain block.⁷

Both the token hash and the edition number participate in its choices. Portions of the hash seed a shift-and-XOR random generator; the edition number is added with different multipliers when that generator is reset for different groups of decisions. A separate seeded gradient-noise implementation supplies smoothly varying values. Thus the image is not simply a palette selected from a hash. Several stages use repeatable but differently initialized streams to choose terrain, colour and structures.⁷

The program creates a square WebGL scene viewed through an orthographic camera. A large plane is divided into a 250-by-250 grid and its vertices are displaced. The height function combines noise at several scales with distance from the central arrangement. Additional terms can introduce ripples, and a sign choice reverses raised and depressed terrain. These operations produce a relatively ordered centre surrounded by more irregular relief.⁷

The stones occupy two to four concentric rings. Their numbers, spacing and accents vary, while some rules omit selected positions. Box and low-resolution sphere geometries are distorted with noise to make the stones less mechanically regular. Orientation changes permit upright, reclining or differently aligned forms. An optional centrepiece can use a sphere, a cone, a box or a dodecahedron. The precise combination is generated afresh for each token.⁷

The inscribed-looking ground is partly a lighting effect. The program draws circles, radiating lines and connecting star patterns onto a canvas, then uses that canvas as a bump map. These fine grooves do not each require a separately excavated channel in the terrain mesh. Larger hills come from displaced vertices, while the smaller markings change the way the surface is shaded. Separating those two scales explains how the work can combine broad, soft topography with delicate linear detail.⁷

A fixed outline made from Bézier curves is extruded to create the small human figure, then scaled and placed relative to the rings and terrain height. The figure is generated inside the script rather than loaded from an image file. Its posture is not animated. Another explicit rule creates rainbow-coloured stones for positive edition numbers divisible by seventy; that condition depends on edition number rather than an inferred rarity label.⁷

Spot and hemisphere lights, shadows, fog and custom shader modifications give the scene its atmosphere. The shader blends colours using illumination and position and adds grain. After a brief initial pause, the animation function gradually increases the rotation of the shared scene container and continues requesting frames. The landscape and figure turn together; individual stones do not roll uphill, and the figure does not walk. The held original visibly changed orientation across observations. No pointer controls, keyboard handlers, audio calls or external artwork assets appear in the artist program.⁷³

A release date before the main minting day

The current index reports 777 invocations and a maximum of 777. Its first token timestamp is August 1, 2021 at 08:47:43 UTC; activation follows on August 2 at 15:52:48 UTC. The official collection labels August 2 as the release date. These records should not be collapsed into a single opening event.⁷⁴

All 777 indexed mint records were inspected. One token was minted on August 1, six on August 2 and 770 on August 9. The first August 9 record, edition seven, is timestamped 17:59:56 UTC; the final edition, 776, is timestamped 19:25:31 UTC. That interval is one hour, twenty-five minutes and thirty-five seconds. It describes the observed August 9 minting span, not a verified advertised sale duration.⁷

Three transaction pages show why a single unqualified mint price would be misleading. Edition one's August 2 transaction minted one token with a value of 0.2 ETH and identifies the sender and recipient as nonfigurativ.eth. Edition seven's August 9 transaction minted one token for 1.5 ETH. The last token's transaction value is 0.25 ETH. Fees are separate.⁸⁹¹⁰ The differing amounts are established, but these samples alone do not prove an auction schedule, discount system or the reason for the earlier purchases.

A September 9, 2021 report in Art Blocks' newsletter lists $96,720 for GiveWell in connection with this project. The report explains that its figures combine artist reports, amounts set aside and calculations from pledges, and are approximate. Accordingly, that number is retained as a contemporary reported charitable contribution, not an independently verified recipient receipt.¹¹

The original announcement, allocation rules, cap-setting history and complete price changes remain unresolved. The current maximum does not establish the initial maximum, and the earlier tokens are not automatically labelled tests or reserves.

A short label leaves a long question

The project metadata gives the artwork licence as NIFTY, with no link or version. That exact label is preserved. Art Blocks’ June 2021 licensing guide identifies NIFTY as shorthand for NFT License 2.0. This supports that attribution, although project-specific adoption and historical changes remain unverified.⁷¹²

The NFT License website's version 2.0, revised November 5, 2018, was inspected as a possible referent. Its grant is tied to ownership of the token and distinguishes personal use, verified marketplace display and certain third-party applications. The latter provision includes conditions about verification and the artwork ceasing to be visible when the owner leaves. The licence also restricts modification and provides a limited merchandise permission. These are properties of the inspected candidate text, not proof of its adoption for this collection.¹³

The script has no separate artist software licence notice. The three.js r124 dependency carries the MIT licence, which permits broad software reuse with its notice conditions. That does not settle the rights in the artist's program, its embedded noise implementation or the human-outline data.⁷¹⁴

Edition 95 is freshly verified against the AB5D profile's complete linked-wallet set.¹⁵³ Its original renderer is shown for noncommercial criticism and identification of the held work. Ownership does not transfer copyright; the exact operative NIFTY terms remain unresolved. The essay's CC0-1.0 dedication covers only its original prose.

Five places for the same labour

The comparison uses four early discovery candidates and one current AB5D holding. Each token was verified on the specified Ethereum contract, and each original renderer was actually viewed. The sample demonstrates visible differences without establishing their frequency across the edition.

Edition zero, token 124000000, is almost monochrome. Dark upright stones occupy an inner circle, while a few lighter reclining stones mark the outer arrangement. The human figure stands apart from them. Soft dark hills and fine concentric lines surround the centre, but low contrast makes the eye work to distinguish object from shadow. The small flashes of pale stone become anchors in an otherwise subdued field.¹

Edition one, token 124000001, uses lavender and pink light over a bluer foreground. Numerous dark upright stones fill the inner rings, while rounded stones punctuate an outer circle. Large overlapping circular inscriptions and straight connecting lines form a dense geometric network beneath them. The brighter atmosphere makes the relation between sculpture and diagram unusually clear: the stones seem both physical objects and markers on a plan.²

Edition ten, token 124000010, places two rings of small rounded or squat stones in a dark red basin. Pale stones alternate with darker ones, and a finer set of loops occupies the inner circle. The surrounding relief rises toward blue-grey shadows. Its low stones make the incised arrangement more prominent than a tall monument would be; the lone figure supplies a vertical accent at the edge of an otherwise horizontal composition.¹⁶

Edition twenty, token 124000020, is pale and open. Tall light stones cast long shadows around a smaller inner ring. Broad intersecting loops cross the central ground, while smooth blue and lavender ridges frame the site. The contrast between upright stones and flowing terrain gives the construction a fragile precision. The figure is small enough that the ring appears to require substantial labour, even though its orderly spacing can be taken in at a glance.¹⁷

Edition 95, token 124000095, is shown above. A ring of pale reclining stones encircles three small interior stones on dark blue ground. Fine radial and concentric markings spread through the surrounding basin. Between observations, the figure moved from the far side toward the left of the image as the entire scene rotated; its position relative to the arrangement remained fixed. The indexed owner matches an AB5D-linked wallet.³¹⁵

Repetition without an ending

The Liths of Sisyphus separates physical stillness from visual movement. Nothing inside the scene needs to build, collapse or change shape for the view to remain active. Rotation continually rearranges overlap, silhouette and the figure's place within the image. The work can suggest endless labour while depicting an arrangement that has already been made.

Its strongest tension lies between exact geometry and uncertain material. The circles and stars imply intention; the uneven rocks and soft terrain complicate that intention. The viewer can recognize a system without discovering a final explanation for the monument. The small figure makes that uncertainty personal, while the distant view keeps its motives inaccessible.

Unresolved research questions:

• What original announcement explains the August 2 release date and August 9 concentration of minting?
• What sale rules produced the observed 0.2, 1.5 and 0.25 ETH payments, and was the initial cap unchanged?
• Which dated prototypes document the relation between the mythic narrative and the program's development?
• Which NIFTY version governs the artwork, and what permits permanent public embedding?
• What licences govern the artist code and embedded components, and can the charitable contribution be independently reconciled?