# Timepiece by WAWAA ## Work and context Timepiece #400 looks like a warm patch of weather caught inside a changing contour. Red and yellow concentrations pass through a peach field, while a thin red boundary swells from an oval into a more angular, rounded figure. Clicking the original reveals three white clock hands. Pressing W replaces the surrounding gradient with white, making the moving body suddenly much more distinct. These behaviours were tested directly in the original renderer, not inferred from a thumbnail.[^S09] The token is currently held by a wallet in the freshly verified AB5D profile. It provides an animated introduction to WAWAA’s Timepiece, Art Blocks project 126 on Ethereum’s original Art Blocks core contract. The platform identifies the work as a Factory release of 500 pieces, dated 7 August 2021.[^S01][^S12] WAWAA is the creative collaboration founded by Alex Warr and Zach Walters. Their own description places generative art alongside design in the studio’s practice. Timepiece brings those activities together particularly clearly: it is both a functioning clock interface and an image whose soft, mutable appearance discourages the quick glance normally used to read a clock.[^S14] The hands are available, but initially hidden. Before revealing them, the viewer encounters deformation, colour and rhythm. After revealing them, the same movement becomes a visible interpretation of a familiar mechanism. The interaction does not introduce a new subject so much as make an existing structure intelligible.[^S09] ## Conception WAWAA describes Timepiece as an investigation of objective and subjective time, with individual outputs ranging from restrained to playful in their graphic and kinetic character. The artist’s account also distinguishes the live clock from its thumbnail: the latter records mint time in UTC. A marketplace image therefore preserves one occasion, while the executable work continues to inhabit the present.[^S01][^S03] The studio’s project guide makes clear that this range was deliberately organised. It separates edge treatments, backgrounds, body size, movement, internal blotches and colour order. It also explains dependencies between them: some outlines require a gradient background, and some combinations suppress blotches. These are not simply independent decorative switches. They establish relationships that keep the parts of the image working together.[^S03] That distinction is especially useful for understanding the softer outputs. A gradient can extend across the entire screen, making the contour the principal sign that a body exists within the field. Elsewhere, a solid background creates a much clearer figure. The clock can thus seem either embedded in its environment or suspended against it. This is an interpretation of the inspected originals, rather than an additional intention assigned to the artists.[^S05][^S06][^S07] The available artist guide is detailed about the finished system but does not reconstruct a dated development sequence. It does not establish why particular pulse frequencies or palette probabilities were selected. Those choices remain visible in the program as decisions, without an invented story about their origin.[^S02][^S03] ## Construction The full inspected program contains 17,133 UTF-8 bytes. It runs with p5.js 1.0.0, creates a WebGL canvas and defines its own vertex and fragment shaders. The hash is split into 32 byte-sized values, each normalised to a number between zero and one. These values choose parameters directly. An initial variable named seed is calculated, but the visible construction mainly follows the normalised byte array rather than a continuing random walk.[^S02] The choices include minimum and maximum radial distances for three moving points, discrete pulse frequencies, body threshold, edge style, background, movement mode and palette. A weighted list selects among 27 five-colour palettes, after which a separate offset rotates the assignment of those colours to the seconds, minutes, hours, centre and background. Thus two pieces can share a palette while distributing its colours differently across the mechanism.[^S02] Time enters through two routes. The routine that updates points reads the current second, minute and hour, deriving angular positions on a conventional twelve-hour clock. It also reads elapsed milliseconds since the sketch began. Cosines of that elapsed time vary the radial distance of each clock-related point and the strength of the central point. p5’s reference distinguishes its current-hour function from its elapsed-runtime function; this distinction is fundamental to the work’s behaviour.[^S02][^S11][^S15] The piece therefore combines clock time with the age of the current viewing session. Its parameters remain fixed for a token, but a screenshot cannot be regenerated from the token hash alone. Current time, elapsed runtime, viewport and rendering environment also matter. The conventional hand angles may return over a twelve-hour cycle, but that does not establish a twelve-hour loop for every pulse and visual state. No complete common repeat period was measured here.[^S02] The fragment shader builds the body as a field. For each pixel, it sums contributions from the three clock-related points and a central point, using their strengths and squared distances. A threshold determines the region treated as the principal figure. Nearby contributions merge smoothly; as the points move apart, the contour can narrow into a neck or separate. This is the mathematical basis for the apparent softness. The program need not simulate liquid or model a three-dimensional object to produce a body that looks as though it stretches.[^S02] Colour is calculated with distance-weighted contributions too. Optional secondary points introduce smaller blotches, sometimes interpolating between the centre colour and the colours associated with the hands. Different edge branches create crisp transitions, glow, blur or narrow contour bands. A separate condition can remove the interior above another threshold, producing a void. The four comparison tokens inspected below all report Void as false, so that possibility is established by code and the artist guide rather than by those observations.[^S02][^S03] The movement option labelled Spirograph adds circular offsets to the three clock-related points. Their offset amplitudes differ, so the mechanism is not simply a rigid rotation of the whole figure. This helps separate the measurable clock direction from the figure’s more restless local movement. The pulse frequencies likewise differ between outputs and between hours, minutes, seconds and centre within one output.[^S02] The renderer fills the available window; it is not restricted to a square image. Scale derives from the smaller pixel dimension, with device density included, and the shader includes a correction for very large pixel areas. The inspected artist code has no resize handler. Responsive reinitialisation and pixel identity across browsers were not tested, so the initial full-window setup should not be confused with a verified resize guarantee.[^S02] Animation begins automatically. A mouse press toggles the clock-hand overlay; W toggles an alternative background treatment. Both controls were verified on #400. S invokes an image-saving function in the source, but that download was not tested. No audio generation or external image-loading call was found, and no audio audition is claimed. The work’s moving surface is procedural rather than a video file played behind the interface.[^S02][^S09] ## Mint and release The current indexed record reports 500 invocations and a maximum of 500. Its first mint occurred on 31 July 2021 at 17:45:09 UTC, before the recorded activation on 2 August at 14:53:13. The second mint and indexed start fall on 7 August at 17:00:18, followed by completion at 17:11:25. That is eleven minutes and seven seconds between the second mint and completion. The artist’s project page independently identifies 7 August as the release date.[^S01][^S03] This chronology distinguishes an earlier individual mint from public release. It does not establish whether that initial token was a test, reserve or another category. Similarly, the current stored price of 0.9 ETH is an indexed configuration observed during this research. It does not, by itself, establish the opening price, a Dutch-auction schedule or every purchaser’s payment. Original pricing and reservation terms remain unresolved in the inspected evidence.[^S01] A dated Art Blocks report supplies another part of the release’s history. Druid’s 9 September 2021 charity roundup attributes approximately $250,000 to Timepiece, split between Every Shelter, Rainforest Foundation, Clean Air Task Force and Climate Vault. The article explicitly explains that its figures mix artist reports, amounts set aside and calculations from pledges, and that recipients could change. The studio’s own page names the same four organisations as beneficiaries. These are substantive contemporary and artist accounts, not an independent reconciliation of every transfer.[^S04][^S03] ## Rights and licensing The current Art Blocks record labels the artwork CC BY-NC 4.0, although its separate licence-link field is empty. The corresponding Creative Commons legal code permits noncommercial sharing and adaptation under its conditions, including attribution, a licence reference and identification of changes. It does not confer unrestricted commercial rights or transfer copyright merely because a token is owned.[^S01][^S10] The studio website also carries a general all-rights-reserved footer. That footer does not explain how its scope relates to the project-specific Art Blocks label. Both observations are retained, with the scope difference disclosed rather than silently resolved. The editorial display basis here is the explicit current project label: an attributed, unmodified original rendering in a noncommercial context, linked to the token and applicable terms. The licence’s historical state has not been reconstructed.[^S03][^S10] No independent permission to redistribute WAWAA’s complete artist program was located. The p5 library is separately identified by its official copyright page as LGPL 2.1; that dependency licence does not automatically govern the artist’s shader, program or output. The package contains research and original prose, not a redistributed copy of the artist code.[^S02][^S13] ## Four outputs **Timepiece #0** uses the indexed Grapefruit palette, a larger body and Spirograph movement. In the original frames inspected, soft yellow and salmon concentrations spread across a peach field. The contour is present but low in contrast, and it changes from a broad, irregular shape to a narrower tilted one. Because colour continues across the edge, the outline seems to register an event within a larger atmosphere rather than enclose a separate painted object.[^S05] **Timepiece #1** produces a much more definite figure. Pink, cyan and dark teal occupy a smaller body against a flat lavender ground. Small internal spots change position and colour between inspected frames, and the silhouette rounds out from a more elongated shape. Its indexed Crisp edge, Solid background, Pulsing blotch mode and Fluid blotch colour correspond to this clearer separation and active interior. The visual boundary is stronger even though the colours inside remain smoothly blended.[^S06] **Timepiece #10** has a dark purple contour around pale cyan and muted purple fields. The background is a cool grey-blue gradient, and smaller dots emerge near the brighter interior between observations. Its Gemini palette, larger body, Spirograph movement and Pulsing blotches produce a different balance from #0: the boundary is emphatic, while the contrast of the broad colour regions stays subdued. The dots introduce a smaller scale of movement within the changing enclosure.[^S07] **Timepiece #20** presents pale green, yellow and turquoise, with a thin light contour. During observation, a rounded projection at the upper right moved toward the right and narrowed at its connection to the larger body. The Key Lime palette and smaller body make this articulation particularly easy to see. It reports Normal movement and no blotches; the changing neck therefore demonstrates how much shape variation is already possible without the additional Spirograph offset or internal spots.[^S08] These are observations at particular moments, not permanent descriptions of four silhouettes. The tokens were selected as early editions for reproducible identification, rather than as a statistical sample or rarity ranking. Their strongest comparison lies in the relationship between edge, ground and interior: subtle continuity in #0, distinct enclosure in #1, dark outlining in #10 and visibly articulated shape in #20.[^S05][^S06][^S07][^S08] ## Significance and open questions Timepiece separates the identity of an artwork from the persistence of any one appearance. Its hash fixes a character: colour allocation, scale ranges, pulse choices and rendering treatments. Time then performs that character. The hidden hands make this legible as an encounter between measurement and sensation, because the same mechanism can be experienced first as a drifting coloured body and then as a clock.[^S02][^S09] Its place among clock-based generative works is also documented by another artist. In a 2023 account of developing because unless until, ixnayokay lists Timepiece alongside other clock-oriented projects considered as context. The account explicitly says those works had little influence on the eventual project. That is useful evidence of recognition and comparison, while resisting the stronger and unsupported claim of direct artistic lineage.[^S16] The original renderer remains essential to understanding the work. A mint-time image has historical meaning, but omits the pulses, changing contour and moment of revealing the hands. Preserving both the static record and the live behaviour lets each perform its different role.[^S01][^S09] Unresolved research questions: - What prototypes and criteria produced the final frequencies, palette weights and conditional combinations? - What were the original sale prices, price changes and reserve arrangements? - What purpose did the first July mint serve? - Which payments reconcile the reported charitable amounts and beneficiaries? - How does the studio footer relate to the project-specific licence, and was a separate code licence issued? - How reliably do clock interpolation, long runtime, resizing and different graphics environments preserve equivalent behaviour? [^S01]: Art Blocks / WAWAA. [Timepiece collection and current index](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/timepiece-by-wawaa). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S02]: WAWAA. [Timepiece complete artist program](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S03]: WAWAA. [Timepiece project and attribute guide](https://www.wawaa.studio/timepiece). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S04]: Druid / The Link, Art Blocks. [Update: Charity on Chain: 23.5 Million in August](https://medium.com/the-link-art-blocks/update-charity-on-chain-23-5-million-in-august-b4876db65c77). Published 2021-09-09. Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S05]: WAWAA. [Timepiece #0](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/126000000). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S06]: WAWAA. [Timepiece #1](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/126000001). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S07]: WAWAA. [Timepiece #10](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/126000010). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S08]: WAWAA. [Timepiece #20](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/126000020). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S09]: WAWAA. [Timepiece #400](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/126000400). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S10]: Creative Commons. [Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 legal code](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.en). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S11]: p5.js. [hour reference](https://p5js.org/reference/p5/hour/). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S12]: Art Blocks / AB5D. [AB5D current collector profile](https://www.artblocks.io/profile/ab5d). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S13]: p5.js. [p5 copyright and acknowledgement](https://p5js.org/copyright/). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S14]: WAWAA. [About WAWAA](https://www.wawaa.studio/about). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S15]: p5.js. [millis reference](https://p5js.org/reference/p5/millis/). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S16]: ixnayokay. [About because unless until](https://www.ixnayokay.art/post/about-because-unless-until). Published 2023-08-22. Accessed 2026-09-18.