transparency

The work and its context

transparency is project 427 on the Art Blocks contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, which the index types as GenArt721CoreV3. The index records 29 invocations against a maximum of 29, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 0.77778 (7:9) and the licence CC BY 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹. The project sits in the Presents vertical and is listed on Art Blocks as part of the Art Blocks 500 ¹². The artist, who signs as usnea in lower case, has no biography, website or social links in the Art Blocks artist record ¹.

Each output is a sheet of tinted, mottled paper on which translucent rectangles are laid down like washes of watercolour. Where two rectangles overlap the colour deepens, which is the effect the title names. The mint text puts it plainly: "square figures, like pixels forming a picture, create prefigurative, fuzzy images with watercolor motifs" ¹.

Art Blocks describes Presents as a collection "established in November 2022 as a successor to the Playground and Factory collections", with projects "selected by the Art Blocks team" ³. In November 2025 Art Blocks closed its flagship catalogue at 500 projects across six categories, Presents among them ⁴. transparency is therefore one of the smaller and quieter works inside a fixed canon.

Conception and development

The only artist statement found is the project description stored on chain. It names four influences: "Paul Klee, Anni Albers, Hilma af Klint, and Alexey Pajitnov" ¹. The last is the designer of Tetris, and the grid of falling-block rectangles in many outputs makes the reference legible. The statement ties the squares to childhood: they are "reminiscent of the basic things we drew as children, creating a sense of nostalgia and simplicity" ¹. It also gives the reason for the title: "the overlapping transparent rectangles add a sense of depth and tonal variety" ¹.

The creative credit thanks Oleg Abakshonok, saying "he's helped me a lot with finalizing the script". It also thanks Daniel Shiffman and Orr Kislev "for helpful tutorials" ¹. Abakshonok describes himself on his own link page as a "Generative artist and Digital 3D Artist" who offers collaboration and consulting on p5.js projects ⁵. The extent of his contribution to the program is not documented.

The artist's own page for the project, usnea.art/transparency, is given as the project website in the index and appears in search results. It could not be fetched for this draft ¹. The previous AB5D essay drew on the same stored description and on the index, and its dates and hashes are kept here where they agree with the data ⁶. One correction: that essay placed the project on "Art Blocks' V2 core contract", but the index types the contract as V3 ⁶¹.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 14,093 bytes, SHA-256 86c6d2f5faad2c517293852fa5512a8f11c28bdb8f1d58a4271a6e0b952ade69. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

The program seeds two sfc32 generators from the two halves of the token hash, discards the first half million values of each, and alternates between them. It also seeds p5's noise from that stream, so each output is fixed by its hash ¹. The canvas is sized to the window at 7:9. Renders from the Art Blocks media proxy measure 1,867 by 2,400 pixels (own check of #14 and #24) ¹.

Drawing happens in four stages ¹:

• Paper. Every pixel of an off-screen layer is stippled in one of six paper colours, with opacity set by Perlin noise, then washed over with white by a second noise pass. The result is a faint, blotted tint rather than a flat colour.
• Edges. A soft rounded border of eight grey outlines is always drawn. With the frame trait, a hand-drawn grey rule is also added a margin in from each edge, built from hundreds of tiny noise-weighted dots.
• Composition. A single number between 0 and 23 chooses one of four layouts.
• Rectangles. Each rectangle is filled at low opacity, outlined with dotted noise-weighted strokes, stippled with 150 faint rounded squares and dots, and finally textured pixel by pixel with noise. This is the watercolour effect.

The published traits can all be reproduced from the program. A Python re-implementation of the generator, run against the 29 token hashes, matched all six traits on every token (own computation) ¹.

In an overlay, a hidden grid of 9, 12, 15, 18 or 21 columns is chosen. Between about 9 and 63 rectangles of one to four cells are dropped onto it at random, so they stack and darken. In a spread, the program picks one of twenty preset layouts that fix a snapping step and ranges of width and height. It then places up to 400 candidate rectangles and discards any that would overlap one already drawn or run past the margin ¹. That is why spreads read as tidy mosaics (#0), loose scatters of squares (#20) or rows of thin bars (#26).

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 29 token records, turned up the following. Points that rest on the code alone are marked as a code reading.

1. The seasons are not palettes. The index lists fifteen palette names ¹. Four of them, spring, autumn, winter and summer, name ways of generating random colours: warm mixes, reds and oranges with no blue, blues, and purples. The other eleven are fixed lists of hex colours. The "randomly generated palette" flag is true exactly when the palette is a season, on all 29 tokens, so the two traits carry the same information. A fixed palette is still drawn for the seasonal outputs and then ignored (own computation) ¹.
2. Four palettes never appeared. The seven fixed palettes that do occur sit at exactly the positions in the program that the index's list of names predicts. On that mapping the four that never occur are Hilma af Klint, mono red, candy shop and mono orange. So one of the artist's four named influences has a palette in the code that no output uses. The mapping for the four absent palettes is inferred from the order, not stated anywhere ¹.
3. Two layouts were never minted. The "lines" layout lays short parallel brush strokes over a grid. A fourth layout lays up to eight full-height columns and ten full-width bands across the sheet, like a woven check. The index's list of composition values has only overlay, lines and spread, so the band layout has no label of its own ¹. Neither appears in the 29 outputs. With these weights, the chance that 29 outputs avoid both is about 14 per cent (own computation). #26 came closest: its layout number was 22.42, just short of the 22.5 needed for the bands.
4. Paper names and paper colours. The paper called "white" is a warm tan in the code, and "beige" is a dusty terracotta. Every paper is then heavily washed with white, so the labels may describe the finished look rather than the stored colour (code reading) ¹.
5. Hidden parameters. The column count of an overlay (9 to 21) and its density are not published as traits, though they decide whether an overlay is made of a few large blocks or many small ones. Across the 17 overlays and 12 spreads, the counts were 9 columns 8 times, 21 columns 7 times, 18 columns 6, 15 columns 5 and 12 columns 3 (own computation) ¹.
6. Work done for nothing. Every token builds 150 to 400 candidate rectangles for the spread layout, even when it will draw an overlay. Those random draws still shift everything that follows, including the choice of paper. In a spread, rejected rectangles still pass through the drawing routine, off the canvas at zero size. A final clean-up loop skips entries as it deletes them, and its result is never used (code reading) ¹.
7. The frame that is always there. The eight faint rounded outlines at the very edge are drawn whatever the frame trait says. "Frame: no" removes only the inner hand-drawn rule (code reading) ¹.
8. Paper grain depends on screen size. The paper's noise scale is multiplied by the canvas scale and then applied per pixel, so the mottling grows finer as the canvas grows. The noise inside the rectangles is scaled the other way and stays consistent. Also, the offsets for that texture take their horizontal value from the rectangle's vertical position and vice versa, which is harmless (code reading) ¹.
9. Interaction. The only interaction is the one the description mentions: pressing "s" saves a PNG named "transparency". The drawing runs once and stops ¹.

The most coveted variants

No source found for this draft names grails for transparency, reports a record sale or describes collector sets. What follows is based on the trait data only.

Single named palettes. Three named palettes occur once each: Stendhal (#20), night fire (#9) and beach umbrella (#3). mono black occurs once too, on #14 ¹. Stendhal is a range of reds, deep reds and blacks, presumably after Le Rouge et le Noir. At the low opacity of the washes it reads as coral pinks and warm greys.

mono black. #14 draws only in black, so its washes build up as greys. Where rectangles stack, the greys deepen almost to charcoal. It is an overlay on lavender paper with 18 columns and no grid ¹. It is held by AB5D.

Rare papers and frameless sheets. Grey paper (#4) and beige paper (#19) occur once each. Five outputs have no frame: #8, #9, #15, #17 and #18 ¹.

Spreads of thin bars. Three spreads use the same preset of long, one-unit-high bars: #3, #5 and #26 ¹. #26 has "white" paper and the spring colour mode. Its pastel strips read like a stack of Tetris pieces or a woven sample. It is also the output that came closest to the unminted band layout.

Grids. Eight overlays carry the pencil grid, which makes the Pajitnov reference most explicit. They are #9, #10, #12, #17, #19, #22, #24 and #28 ¹. #28 pairs the grid with blue paper and the summer mode.

Invocation 0. #0 is a spread in tropical forest greens on pink paper. Its blocks snap to a 50-pixel step and butt against each other, like a patchwork ¹. It was minted by the artist's address and has never left it ¹.

At retrieval the 29 tokens were held by 24 addresses. The largest holding is AB5D's, with four: #14, #24, #26 and #28. #14, #26 and #28 arrived on 22 September 2025 and #24 on 13 October 2025, each through the same intermediate address ¹. The OpenSea collection page, read through an automated extraction, lists sales of #14, #24, #26 and #28 at about $740 to $930 each. That page also gives a count of 28 items, against the index's 29, and its figures could not be checked for this draft ⁷. The index recorded a single listing, at 1.99 ETH, at retrieval ¹².

The mint

The first three tokens, #0 to #2, were minted by the artist's address on 22 February 2023. The first was at 17:00:59 UTC, before the project was activated on 23 February at 06:26:11 UTC ¹. #1 and #2 left the artist's address on 29 and 28 March 2023 ¹. The public sale opened on 27 March 2023 at 17:00 UTC. The first public mint, #3, followed at 17:22:59, and #3 to #14 were all minted within 45 minutes. By the end of that day 17 of the 29 existed ¹. The rest came slowly: four more in March, one in April, one in May, and the last six on 13 June 2023. The final token, #28, was minted at 20:34:35 UTC ¹. Twelve tokens are still held by the address that minted them ¹.

The index does not record the primary sale price. Its price field reads 0 and it holds no minter configuration for the project ¹. The sales notes are empty. The project record commits "10% of primary sales" to the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund (UN Crisis Relief) via Crypto for Charity ¹.

The signed prints. The description promised that "the first 13 mints (#0 - #12)" would receive a signed print of 18 by 14 cm, "posted anywhere in the world" ¹². Three of those thirteen were the artist's own pre-activation mints. No record has been found of how many prints were claimed or sent.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY 4.0, linked to the Creative Commons deed ¹. On that licence, anyone may share and adapt the images, including commercially, provided usnea is credited. That is more permissive than the non-commercial and bespoke NFT licences common on the platform. 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 and are credited to usnea under that licence.

Significance and limitations

transparency is a small, careful work: 29 soft, paper-like images built from one idea, the translucent rectangle, with a hand-drawn texture that is unusual among grid-based generative work. The program is compact and open about its traits. All six can be reproduced exactly from the code, although two traits say the same thing. Two of its four layouts and four of its eleven fixed palettes, including one named after Hilma af Klint, exist only in the code. As a member of the closed Art Blocks 500, it is also a record of the Presents programme's range in early 2023 ³⁴.

The main limitation is the lack of any outside source. There are no interviews, no criticism and no sale records beyond an unverified marketplace page. Even the artist's website could not be read.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What was the primary sale price and mechanism on 27 March 2023? The index holds no minter configuration and the price field reads 0.
2. Who is usnea? The Art Blocks artist record is empty and usnea.art/transparency could not be fetched. An X or Instagram account, if one exists, is a lead to follow up by hand.
3. How many of the thirteen promised signed prints were claimed and posted, and do any photographs of them exist?
4. Can the OpenSea sale figures for #14, #24, #26 and #28 (automated extraction, unconfirmed) be checked against transaction records? Who operates the intermediate address that delivered all four to AB5D?
5. What label would Art Blocks' feature script give the unminted band layout? The mapping of the four unused palette names is also inferred and should be confirmed against the feature script.

Bibliography