# Total Strangers by Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw

## The work and its context

Total Strangers is a 555-edition generative art series by the duo Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 326, in the factory category with heritage placement in the AB500 set.[^S01][^S06] Each output is a procedurally assembled portrait drawn in a single fluid line on a virtual sheet of paper, graph-ruled, lined with a red margin, or plain, in pencil, pen or marker, the face unfolding stroke by stroke while the viewer watches.[^S01][^S02][^S10]

The description frames the series as a tribute to drawing itself: "In the right hand, a pen can effortlessly reveal the most characteristic features of a person, inside and out. Following the twist and turn of the line, echoes of practice and repetition, the path becomes a walk through the recesses of a subconscious human mind. Total Strangers pays tribute to this time-honoured flight of the human creativity, generating a rogue's gallery of faces from a continuous fluid line and a virtual pencil case of select drawing tools."[^S01] The invitation is explicit: "We invite you to follow the line as it goes for a walk", an unmistakable echo of Paul Klee's famous dictum, and the work is kinetic by design: the line is drawn live, in front of you.[^S01]

The AB5D dossier describes Verkhovskiy and Shaw as a collaborative practice established in 2021, with Andy Shaw based in New Zealand, working under the heading "Tidal Systems and Generative Likeness".[^S06] The duo has three works in the AB500 set: High Tide (745 editions), Total Strangers (555 editions) and Low Tide (373 editions), moving "from abstract environmental simulations to more figurative explorations"; their collector-metric rank in the set is 26 of 308.[^S06] The project's registered website is the duo's Linktree, which presents the three series under the tagline "Aquatic Zen Gardens | Tumbling Shorelines | Penned Portraits" and has been active since June 2021.[^S01][^S07] The series runs on p5.js 1.0.0 at a square aspect ratio with zero external assets, carries the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, and its artist script is 77,663 bytes, the largest in this batch so far.[^S01][^S02]

## Conception and development

The conception is the sketchbook made procedural. Where GHOST IN THE CODE, its neighbor in the batch, compresses a face into a fixed personality with a shifting expression, Total Strangers goes the other way: it simulates the act of drawing, the pen going "for a walk", so that every portrait arrives with the tempo and hesitation of a human hand.[^S01] The "rogue's gallery" framing matters: these are strangers, types rather than portraits of anyone, cast from "a virtual pencil case of select drawing tools".[^S01]

The collaboration is itself part of the conception story. The dossier dates the duo's practice to 2021 and reads their three-series arc as a movement from tidal landscapes toward "procedural portraits that explore identity through algorithmic variation", with Total Strangers as the figurative endpoint.[^S06] The Linktree's ordering tells the same story in the artists' own curation: two water works, then "Penned Portraits".[^S07]

The script shows how far the simulation of a drawing session was taken. Faces are assembled from a component library of separately coded eye, brow, nose, mouth, ear and hair sets, with a gender draw that assigns roughly 40 percent female, 40 percent male and 20 percent nonbinary presentations, and a head-rotation draw weighted across fixed angles; paper types carry their own texture layers, blended in multiply mode, and ink filters include a warm grade and a gray grade.[^S02] No project-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty, so the conception account rests on the description, the dossier, the Linktree and the script.[^S01]

## How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug total-strangers-by-artem-verkhovskiy-x-andy-shaw and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 326. The retrieved script is 77,663 bytes with SHA-256 digest c03abf76e1613868334868aff40acacf06209afccd4456b807ad6ae00117cd87, and it was read in full.[^S01][^S02]

Randomness comes from a hand-written Random class implementing the sfc32 algorithm twice: prngA and prngB are seeded with the first and second 32-character halves of the chain hash, warmed up together with one million iterations, and alternated for every draw through random_dec(), with random_num, random_int and random_choice helpers layered on top; Math.random is never called.[^S02] The face is assembled from named component arrays, eleven-plus variants each of eyes, brows, noses, mouths, ears and hair, composed into an offscreen graphics buffer; paper textures are separate image layers blended in multiply mode, with a "Warm" grade built from stacked blend modes and a "Gray" filter variant, plus a rare inverted dark variant when the background draw hits its top band.[^S02] Noise and bezier calls shape the line quality.[^S02]

The drawing is animated: the portrait is stroked progressively into the buffer over time, which is why the live view shows the line unfolding rather than a finished face.[^S02][^S09] The description documents three keyboard controls, all found in the script's keyPressed handler by key code: P (80/112) pauses and resumes, B (66/98) toggles a transparent background, and F (70/102) switches the target frame rate between 30 and 60.[^S01][^S02] The live renderer exercised all three on token 326000478: the reported hash matched the chain record exactly, P froze the animation (two frames ten seconds apart identical) and a second P resumed it, B visibly toggled the background layer, and F doubled the measured frame throughput from about 30 to about 60 frames per ten-second window; no audio or video elements exist in the page.[^S09]

## The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows a near-instant public sale after a single pre-mint.[^S01][^S04] Edition 0 was minted on June 14, 2022 at 04:40:43 UTC to the artist address recorded in the dossier, four days before the project was activated on June 18 at 19:44:31 UTC.[^S01][^S04][^S06] The registry's sale-start timestamp reads July 11, 2022 at 18:00:00 UTC, and the official collection page carries "Released Jul 11, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC".[^S01][^S03]

Then the sale detonated: editions 1, 10 and 20 all minted at 18:00:18 UTC, the two AB5D treasury editions 478 and 537 both at 18:01:22 UTC, and the final edition 554 at 18:01:29 UTC.[^S04] The entire public run of 554 editions sold in about 89 seconds, the fastest sellout in this batch; the registry's completed_at equals the last mint's timestamp to the second.[^S01][^S04] The project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.[^S01] The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.[^S01] The AB5D collection holds exactly two editions, numbers 478 and 537, both held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045 and minted in the same second.[^S04][^S05]

## Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC 4.0" for Total Strangers, with the terms URL recorded in the record.[^S01] This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC 4.0.[^S01] The CC BY-NC 4.0 deed grants the freedoms to Share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to Adapt, remix, transform and build upon the material, under two conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; and NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes. The deed also forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.[^S08]

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.[^S02] The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the p5.js 1.0.0 library noted in the script type, and the paper textures are generated or embedded by the script itself rather than fetched.[^S01][^S02] Owning a Total Strangers token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.[^S04]

## Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.[^S09][^S10]

Edition 478 (token 326000478, minted July 11, 2022 at 18:01:22 UTC, eighty-two seconds into the sale), the AB5D-held header, is a bold marker portrait on blue-lined notebook paper with a red margin: an angular head with swept hair, heavy black brows, a prominent ear, a downturned mouth, and one flash of color, a violet paperclip-shaped accent on the cheek, the only non-black mark in the sample.[^S04][^S05][^S10] In the live view the line drew itself from the hairline downward, and all three documented keys behaved as coded: P froze and resumed the drawing, B stripped the paper to transparency, F doubled the frame cadence.[^S09]

Edition 0 (token 326000000, the pre-activation mint of June 14, 2022, to the artist address) is the pencil sketch of the set: a rounded face on blue-graph paper, droopy eyes, a curling mustache-mouth and a sweep of hair, all in one grey graphite line.[^S04][^S10] Edition 1 (token 326000001, minted in the first public second) switches ink: a single steel-blue line on ruled paper with a red margin, a boyish face with round spectacled eyes and a small smile.[^S04][^S10]

Edition 10 (token 326000010) is the quietest: a silver-grey marker face on plain white paper, swept-back hair, heavy-lidded eyes and a toothy grin, the palest ink in the sample.[^S04][^S10] Edition 537 (token 326000537, the second AB5D holding, minted in the same second as 478) is the most characterful: a rounded head with two great swirled hair buns, spiral spectacle eyes, a pointed nose and a tiny toothy mouth in thick black line on cream paper, a face halfway between a storybook aunt and a cartoon witch.[^S04][^S05][^S10] Across the five, the constants are the single confident line and the paper; the variables are ink color, tool weight, paper ruling and the cast of the face.[^S10]

## Significance and limitations

Total Strangers is the batch's fastest sellout, 554 editions in 89 seconds, and its most literal celebration of drawing: a component-library portrait engine that performs its own making in real time, keys and all.[^S01][^S04][^S09] As the figurative capstone of the duo's tide-to-portrait arc documented in the dossier, it also anchors the AB5D collection's only double holding in this batch, editions 478 and 537 minted in the same second.[^S04][^S05][^S06]

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

- The original mint price at the July 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.[^S01]
- No project-specific interview was located; the registry interview field is empty.[^S01]
- The artists maintain no dedicated project site beyond the Linktree; development history before the 2021 practice start recorded in the dossier is not documented in inspected sources.[^S06][^S07]
- The rare inverted dark variant coded in the script was not observed in the five-token sample.[^S02][^S10]
- The F key's 30/60 frame-rate targets were verified only as a doubling of measured throughput; absolute rates of 30 and 60 fps are not reachable under the software renderer used for the probe.[^S09]

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [Total Strangers by Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw: project registry record (projects_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S02]: Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw. [Total Strangers full artist script (projects_metadata.script)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S03]: Art Blocks. [Total Strangers: official collection page](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/total-strangers-by-artem-verkhovskiy-x-andy-shaw). Accessed 2026-09-20T11:37:00Z.
[^S04]: Art Blocks. [Total Strangers token records (tokens_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:52Z.
[^S05]: Art Blocks. [AB5D linked wallet set (user_profiles query)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:22:10Z.
[^S06]: AB5D. [Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw artist dossier](https://ab5d.xyz/artists/artem-verkhovskiy-x-andy-shaw/). Accessed 2026-09-20T11:36:00Z.
[^S07]: Artem Verkhovskiy x Andy Shaw. [LowTideAB Linktree (project website)](https://linktr.ee/LowTideAB). Accessed 2026-09-20T11:36:30Z.
[^S08]: Creative Commons. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International deed](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:24:15Z.
[^S09]: Art Blocks. [Total Strangers live renderer, token 326000478](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/326000478). Accessed 2026-09-20T11:42:00Z.
[^S10]: Art Blocks. [Total Strangers static preview media, tokens 326000000/326000001/326000010/326000478/326000537](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/326000478.png). Accessed 2026-09-20T11:39:00Z.