# Traversals by Loren Bednar ## The work and its context Traversals #9, the verified AB5D-held example, places an angular violet body on lavender. Broad planes rise from the left and converge towards a narrow point at the right, while pale seams cut across them. A click on the original renderer makes several facets flash white before their purple colours return. The geometry stays in place: the intervention changes the experience of its layered surfaces rather than replacing the composition.[^S09] Traversals is Loren Bednar’s 150-edition Factory release, project 65 on the Art Blocks contract identified in this record. The official collection page dates its release to 18 May 2021. Its description specifies colour, layered intersections, hash-dependent endpoints, divergences, elevations, and colour immersion. It invites a left click or key press for coruscation. These terms describe a particular relation between a stable arrangement and an activated colour event.[^S01][^S02] The current AB5D profile links three wallets, and the fresh token record places #9 in one of them. The header should therefore use that token’s original live renderer with its control behaviour preserved. An initial still is useful as a fallback, but it cannot deliver the documented interaction. Conversely, forcing an automatic click would invent a presentation behaviour absent from the artwork’s initial state.[^S09][^S10] ## Conception and development Jeff Davis’s August 2021 Art Blocks interview identifies Traversals as Bednar’s first Factory project. Bednar describes early experiments with LOGO and Flash, independently making mathematical patterns, and encountering Art Blocks in early 2021. The interview provides a near-contemporary account of his route into the platform. Its detailed explanation of interference patterns and compression, however, concerns phase, the later project then approaching release; it should not be imported as Traversals’ development history.[^S07] The 2023 Unit London interview adds a later account of Bednar’s visual-first, iterative method. He describes making small changes, following anomalies, and adjusting results until they form a consistent idea. Its biography names Traversals for its luminous layered intersections. This helps situate the earlier work in his practice, but it is not a dated log of the decisions that produced the May 2021 program.[^S08] A dedicated development diary for Traversals was not recovered. The clearest project-specific evidence remains its published description and the complete script. Those sources support an account of intersecting paths, filled regions, and an optional colour transformation. They do not identify a particular historical painting or movement as an influence. Visual resemblance to folded paper, glass, or architectural planes can be useful descriptive interpretation without being assigned to the artist as intention.[^S01][^S03] That distinction leaves room for close looking. The sampled outputs make translucent planes appear to occupy different depths even though the renderer works in two dimensions. A dark seam can divide an apparently solid object, while another edge seems to disappear beneath an overlapping fill. The viewer repeatedly decides whether a line belongs to a boundary, an internal joint, or the background showing through. This ambiguity is an effect of the image, not evidence of a three-dimensional model.[^S04][^S12][^S13] ## How the work was constructed The complete 8,839-byte artist script was freshly retrieved and read. Its digest agrees with the independently repeated audit. The recorded source is the Art Blocks index, not a block-pinned direct chain retrieval. The program uses p5.js 1.0.0, creates a square canvas from the smaller viewport dimension, sets pixel density to two, and works with an HSB colour range whose hue maximum is 300.[^S03] It begins by splitting the token hash into thirty-two hexadecimal byte pairs. These values determine endpoint selections, layer counts, segment choices, and colour behaviour. Several sums select branches affecting density, saturation, background, and outline treatment. There is no need to presume that every visible decision comes from a conventional random-number generator: much of the script maps particular byte values directly into a bounded choice.[^S03] The initial geometry is organised around a six-unit pad with a surrounding gap, expressed in a 1,024-unit reference space. Endpoint candidates lie on opposing sides. Validation moves a candidate to another available position when a node would be duplicated. The script maps those side positions into coordinates, tests paths for intersections, and collects intersection points alongside the endpoints into segment arrays. Scaling then adapts those stored coordinates to the actual canvas.[^S03] During drawing, hash-derived choices select portions of pairs of segments. Their endpoints provide the vertices of filled polygons. Alternative branches use fuller spans and different outlines. Background-coloured strokes can cut across the coloured regions, producing the seams that make planes appear separated even when their fills overlap. It is a flat compositing procedure capable of suggesting elevation without calculating a lit three-dimensional surface.[^S03] On the first frame the program records each shape’s baseline hue, saturation, brightness, and opacity. The recurring draw function clears and redraws the background and shapes, but `canCoruscate` begins false. A continuously running p5 callback therefore does not mean that the work automatically starts its colour event. The initial composition is the resting state.[^S03] Both the mouse-click and key handlers call `coruscate`. That function enables coruscation and, when an event is not already running, schedules shapes at five-frame offsets. The colour branches can reduce saturation, change brightness, and then return towards baseline values; some branches also adjust hue. The event concerns the stored shapes’ colour state while their vertices remain fixed. Frame offsets are implementation evidence, not a measured wall-clock duration.[^S03] The current original #9 was observed before a click, immediately after it, and again later. Pale or white facets appeared after the click and subsequently returned to the purple arrangement. A later key press did not produce an unambiguous captured change, so keyboard activation is supported by code and description but not claimed as visually verified in this test. No audio machinery was found, and no audio audition was performed. No authored resize handler was identified.[^S09][^S03] ## The mint The first indexed token was minted on 15 May 2021 at 14:36:27 UTC. Activation is recorded on 18 May at 12:28:28, while the second mint occurred at 20:02:14 that day. The second mint matches the indexed start setting. Art Blocks’ displayed release date, 18 May, therefore names a later calendar milestone than the first token.[^S02] Completion is recorded on 18 June 2021 at 22:13:29 UTC. Both current invocations and maximum invocations are 150. The interval from the second mint to completion is thirty-one days, two hours, eleven minutes, and fifteen seconds. This is an explicitly defined interval between indexed events, not proof of continuously open public purchasing or of the precise public-sale endpoint.[^S02] The current price setting is 0.1 ETH. The fresh record has no sales notes establishing the original price schedule. Neither current configuration nor secondary-market asking prices prove what a buyer paid in 2021. Original opening price, any subsequent changes, reserved allocations, and the first token’s role remain unresolved. The evidence supports the edition’s recorded progression without requiring an invented rapid-sellout narrative.[^S02] ## Copyright and licensing The reported artwork label is CC BY-NC 4.0, with no populated licence URL in the project record. The corresponding Creative Commons operative terms allow noncommercial sharing and adaptation with attribution and related conditions. A display should identify Bednar and the work, retain relevant supplied notices, link the original and licence, and indicate modifications. Ownership of the token does not itself establish copyright or make every publication noncommercial.[^S02][^S06] The whole artist program has no separately established licence in this research. Its visibility through an index or renderer is not permission to copy and redistribute it. The exact p5.js 1.0.0 library carries LGPL 2.1, which belongs in the dependency record rather than being applied to the artwork. The research package retains the digest and analytical findings without redistributing the artist script.[^S03][^S15] The essay’s original prose is separately designated CC0. That does not change the artwork’s restrictions. For preservation, retain the original renderer as the primary recommendation and the inspected still as an accessible fallback. The colour event requires interaction; a static PNG cannot establish that the controls function, and an untested future embed should not be called verified merely because the direct original works.[^S06][^S09] ## Close readings of four outputs Traversals #0 spreads a magenta, purple, and red-orange body across a very dark brown field. Its broad upper edge rises towards the right, while a long point descends towards the lower left. A horizontal dark cut intersects several diagonals, and multiple paths converge at a point below and right of centre. The colour changes inside the planes make that convergence feel deeper than the outer silhouette alone would suggest.[^S04] The empty area above the shape matters as much as the crowded interior. It gives the rising edge room to act as a single directional gesture before the eye encounters the subdivisions. Following a diagonal through that interior can suddenly become difficult where an overlapping fill changes its apparent importance. The composition moves attention across a stable arrangement without needing its vertices to animate.[^S04] Traversals #1 occupies more of the square with an upright, irregular pink-and-purple cluster on dark ground. Several narrow peaks rise at the top, while pink planes broaden through the centre and angle out towards the lower corners. Thick dark slashes cross the lower half, and partially visible diagonal lines inside the fills create another layer of structure.[^S12] Compared with #0’s relatively coherent outer sweep, #1 repeatedly interrupts the eye’s route. The upper peaks promise separate directions; the broad pink centre brings them together; the lower slashes divide that centre again. Saturated colour supplies continuity across cuts that would otherwise fragment the body. This is a useful demonstration of the project description’s emphasis on layered intersections, rather than a simple stack of unrelated triangles.[^S12][^S01] Traversals #10 is much lower and more horizontal. A pale cream ground surrounds rust, brown, and olive planes stretching from a left-pointing triangle into a wider right-hand body. Pale slanted seams divide the central region, with a near-vertical gap separating two larger sections. The modest occupied height leaves expansive ground above and below, making the image feel more measured and suspended than #1.[^S13] Traversals #20 returns to a taller cluster on pink. Blue and indigo peaks project above a broad dark-purple upper plane; magenta triangles cross the middle; pale diagonal lines run towards the lower right. Some edges read as cuts in the colour, while others seem to pass behind it. The lighter ground makes these seams far more conspicuous than the dark separations in #0.[^S14] The held #9 provides a final comparison. Its lavender background and related pale seams make parts of the violet body seem almost detached from one another. When clicked, selected planes temporarily whiten, briefly changing which regions dominate without changing the outline. The effect demonstrates why a close reading of the initial frame and an account of interaction should remain connected but distinct. The five inspected originals are a comparative sample, not a census of trait frequencies.[^S09] ## Significance and limitations Traversals distinguishes itself through the relationship between intersecting geometry and a viewer-initiated colour event. The initial image already has strong directional structure, layered depth cues, and a deliberate balance of occupied and empty ground. Coruscation briefly redistributes emphasis inside that structure. It is therefore more precise to describe an interactive composition than an automatically looping animation.[^S01][^S03][^S09] Its place in Bednar’s practice is supported by the later interviews, but the work need not borrow the conception story of phase or the motion methods of Resonate. The inspected script and originals give Traversals its own account: a limited vocabulary of endpoints, intersections, filled spans, outlines, and colour states produces markedly different arrangements.[^S03][^S07][^S08] Unresolved research questions: - What were the original mint price, price changes, reserved allocations, and first token’s purpose? - Is there a project-specific development account beyond the published description and later interviews? - What separate permissions govern reuse of the complete artist program? - How do keyboard focus, browser scheduling, and display density affect interaction and fine edges across devices? [^S01]: Art Blocks / Loren Bednar. [Traversals official collection](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/traversals-by-loren-bednar). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S02]: Art Blocks. [Traversals exact project and token index](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S03]: Loren Bednar. [Traversals complete artist program](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S04]: Loren Bednar. [Traversals #0](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/65000000). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S06]: Creative Commons. [CC BY-NC4.0 operative terms](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.en). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S07]: Jeff Davis / Art Blocks. [In Conversation with Loren Bednar](https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-loren-bednar). Published 2021-08-18. Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S08]: Unit London / Loren Bednar. [Loren Bednar: Inspirations and Working Process](https://unitlondon.com/2023-04-26/loren-bednar-inspirations-and-working-process/). Published 2023-04-26. Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S09]: Loren Bednar. [Traversals #9 original and interaction](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/65000009). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S10]: Art Blocks / AB5D. [AB5D current linked-wallet profile](https://www.artblocks.io/profile/ab5d). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S12]: Loren Bednar. [Traversals #1](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/65000001). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S13]: Loren Bednar. [Traversals #10](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/65000010). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S14]: Loren Bednar. [Traversals #20](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/65000020). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S15]: Processing Foundation / p5.js. [p5.js1.0.0 licence](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/processing/p5.js/1.0.0/license.txt). Accessed 2026-09-18.