Trossets

Small pieces, shared ground

Trossets #566 initially looks like a pattern of horizontal green bars and pale round studs. Then small knots of half-size forms interrupt the rhythm. A long bar breaks; a cluster of circles becomes more tightly packed; the same vocabulary suddenly seems to operate at another distance. The image is still, yet looking at it involves continual changes of attention. What first reads as an overall textile becomes a collection of parts whose connections can be followed and questioned.¹

Anna Carreras released Trossets through Art Blocks Curated on 3 September 2021. Its 1,000 minted works make a substantial edition from an economical visual language. In her project statement, Carreras describes the title as referring to parts, blocks or pieces and identifies multiscale Truchet tiling as a point of departure. The reference matters because the images are assembled through local components rather than drawn as singular global outlines. The eye supplies larger structures by following connections among those components.²³⁴

The selected originals range from dense curling networks to rows of nearly uninterrupted straight elements. Circles can read as holes, joints, spots or small fixtures. Their rounded geometry softens the suggestion of machinery, while the palettes prevent the work from becoming an impersonal diagram. The result feels designed for examination as much as decoration. Its recurring forms are simple enough to recognise, but their arrangements keep recognition from becoming a final explanation.⁵⁶⁷⁸¹

An installation artist builds a finite edition

In Jeff Davis's interview published two days before release, Carreras explains that she studied engineering after initially wanting to pursue fine art. Seventeen years of interactive installations had taught her to build visual systems that survived unpredictable participation and prolonged exhibition. She could not simply suppress disappointing outcomes. She connected that experience directly to the demands of her Art Blocks project.⁹

The same interview locates Trossets in her interest in diversity emerging from shared components. Childhood play with Meccano informed the geometric building blocks. She wanted collectors to investigate the parts and imagine the rules that had assembled their particular image. Her Mediterranean surroundings and nearby dry inland landscapes supplied a further source of visual experience.⁹

This is an unusually useful invitation because the work supports it at several levels. One can first spot a tiny component, then notice its enlarged counterpart, then ask which apparent connections belong to a tile and which arise across boundaries. Understanding part of the system does not remove the pleasure of looking. It changes that pleasure from surprise at an opaque result to recognition of a rule being used differently.

Carreras' own project page extends the colour context with dated posts about particular palettes. Names connect the work to food, vegetation, buildings and places; the page explains the complementary relationship between the boat and the shelter represented by La Barca and Barraca. These references give the palette vocabulary a lived specificity. They do not make every output a landscape or turn its geometric marks into literal depictions of the named subjects.⁴

A grid that changes its own scale

The complete indexed Trossets script contains 11,540 UTF-8 bytes and specifies p5@1.0.0. Its first substantive operation creates a canvas from the browser's width and height. A custom RND class is seeded from a hexadecimal prefix of tokenData.hash, then uses shifts and exclusive-or operations to produce a repeatable sequence. Subsequent choices are made from that sequence. The full hash is not read as a series of independently assigned traits, and no fresh external data is fetched by the artist program.²

The initial grid normally has twelve columns and seven rows, with alternative arrangements of nine by five or six by three. A common module size is selected from the available horizontal and vertical space, and margins centre the resulting field. The program chooses one of eighteen five-colour palettes. Names such as Montseny, Mallorca, Mar, Industria and Buganvilea are present in the code itself. Colours have functional roles across the tiles rather than being assigned independently to every mark.²

The most important change of scale happens in creaTrossos(). It first populates the coarse grid, then walks backward through those original cells. When a random test succeeds, it removes a cell and appends four cells of half its width, positioned in its quadrants. Because the traversal visits the original list backward and the smaller cells are appended, this is one subdivision pass, not indefinite recursive refinement. The ordinary thresholds produce scattered smaller patches; another branch lowers them substantially for some of the twelve-column arrangements. The resulting variation is visible as local concentrations, not a smooth perspective effect.²

After subdivision, the system chooses one of thirty-one allowed tile lists, p0 through p30. These lists range from a single tile type to broad mixtures. Each surviving cell receives an identifier from the selected list. The dispatcher contains thirteen identifiers, zero through twelve. Carreras' public statement speaks of twelve construction blocks; the implementation count is recorded separately here because a code variant need not correspond one-to-one with an artist's conceptual block. The inspected sources do not explain that counting difference.²⁴

Each drawing routine combines a small set of operations: rounded lines, quarter-circle arcs, discs, and backgrounds whose corners are cut away with circles of the ground colour. Optional flags introduce hollow arcs, rings, segmented circular accents or crosses. The image's intricacy comes from these combinations and their shared placement conventions. There is no neighbour-by-neighbour search for a best fit; larger passages emerge from the chosen pieces meeting on a consistent grid.²

Drawing ends with noLoop(). No custom pointer, keyboard, export, resize or audio handler appears in the complete script. Five original generators were inspected in Chrome, and the held #566 retained its arrangement at a later observation and after reload. This supports a static archive image linked to the original. Other browser sizes were not tested: the code adapts its initial canvas and module size, but cross-device raster equivalence is a different claim from repeatability in the observed browser.¹

One advance token, then forty-seven minutes

The first indexed token, #0, was minted on 28 August 2021 at 08:54:53 UTC. The project's indexed activation occurred on 1 September at 21:24 UTC. The official collection gives 3 September as the release date, consistent with the forthcoming Friday mentioned in the 1 September interview. Those are distinct events. The advance token and activation timestamp should not be presented as the public sale opening.²³⁹

The complete token chronology contains one mint on 28 August and 999 on 3 September. On release day, the first recorded mints occurred at 16:02:07 UTC, and the last at 16:49:47. The observed main-day mint span was therefore 47 minutes and 40 seconds. Both the current maximum and actual invocation count are 1,000. This confirms the completed edition while leaving original cap configuration and the precise status of the advance allocation unresolved.²

Actual transactions anchor the price history. The successful #1 mint in block 13153713 paid 15 ETH, with a separate fee of 0.146717037714295677 ETH. The final #999 mint in block 13153910 paid 3 ETH, with a fee of 0.417453129 ETH. These are two payments for single tokens in the exact collection. They document a substantial price difference across the mint, but do not by themselves establish every auction decrement, the advertised resting price or the exact opening time. A current marketplace listing has no evidentiary role in that reconstruction.¹⁰¹¹

The project statement pledges 10% of profits to marine-conservation organisation Marilles Foundation and 15% of minting profits to OpenArms, which assists refugees crossing the Mediterranean. The differing wording of those bases is retained rather than silently converted into a verified total-proceeds percentage. Art Blocks' September charity update reports approximately $2,099,557 between the two organisations. Its methodology combines reported donations, amounts set aside and pledge-based calculations; this essay has not reconciled the figure to recipient receipts. The philanthropic connection extends the Mediterranean reference beyond palette into the conditions of the release.²¹²

The image, the print and the program

The refreshed official record names CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, with no separate licence URL populated. The corresponding Creative Commons legal code permits noncommercial sharing and adaptation subject to attribution and other conditions. Changes must be indicated, relevant notices retained and the licence linked. Shared adaptations must use the specified compatible ShareAlike terms. Token ownership alone does not confer copyright or remove these conditions.²¹³

This archive uses faithful attribution and links to the original work and licence for noncommercial critical display. Carreras' artwork remains under its reported licence. The archive's CC0 dedication applies to this original prose, not to her image. A distinctive collector benefit is separately documented on Carreras' print page: holders who prove ownership may purchase signed and numbered prints of their corresponding token, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. That artist-operated service should not be mistaken for an exclusive right to every reproduction.¹⁴¹³

The script's availability for inspection is also a different matter from a software licence. No distinct artist-code grant was identified in the complete source or project record. The named p5.js 1.0.0 dependency supplies its own LGPL 2.1 licence text, which concerns the library and cannot simply be relabelled as permission for Carreras' entire program. Keeping those layers separate allows the work to be studied without inventing a wider grant than the evidence establishes.²¹⁵

Five ways to connect the same pieces

The sample combines verified early outputs #0, #1, #10 and #20 with AB5D's held #566. Every observation below comes from actually viewing the official original generator. The selection is purposeful and small; it demonstrates differences without claiming to measure their frequency across the edition.

Edition #0 uses a muted turquoise ground with dark purple curling outlines, red connecting regions and yellow points. Several arcs are hollow, allowing the background to remain visible inside their bands. Little groups of smaller parts interrupt the broad network. The eye can read a continuous apparatus, but it repeatedly encounters loose ends and changes of scale that frustrate any single route through it. The yellow marks behave like bright punctuation distributed through the heavier structure.⁵

Edition #1 is more luminous and more frontal. Yellow and orange regions meet against a nearly white field, while dark and medium blues define discs at regular positions. Large white circles puncture the coloured network. Small patches repeat the same relations in miniature, so the interruptions feel more like a change in sampling scale than a foreign element entering the image. Compared with #0, the solid colour fields carry more of the pattern's identity than outlined paths.⁶

Edition #10 has a beige ground and dominant dark green horizontal bars. Coral dots run along them in short groups, while scalloped olive forms fill the intervals. Small ring-like accents create additional detail around the circular openings. This output is strongly directional: its broad horizontal movement persists even where a few cells break into smaller parts. Those exceptions matter precisely because the larger rhythm is so regular.⁷

Edition #20 is more open. Dark navy bars and curves travel over a pale warm ground among coral and orange circles. Several paths finish with a large coral disc; smaller orange points follow the dark forms. Unlike #10, it offers many possible turns and no single prevailing direction. The unfilled areas are substantial enough to make the pattern feel like a set of objects laid out for assembly, even though its alignments reveal a common underlying grid.⁸

Edition #566 returns to horizontal emphasis in a quieter olive, deep green and cream palette. Long bars dominate the upper portion, while numerous compact clusters complicate the lower right and a patch toward the lower left. Pale circles sometimes sit on joints and sometimes read as detached studs. It is a useful header because its broad order is easy to see at a glance, while its denser regions reward closer attention. A fresh owner query matched this token to an address in the complete three-wallet set linked by AB5D's Art Blocks profile. Ownership and visual selection have both been checked rather than inherited from an old collection cache.¹¹⁶

Diversity remains legible

Trossets makes variation intelligible. Its images do not simply announce that a random process has produced different outcomes. They offer enough repetition for a viewer to discover something about the process, and enough interruption to keep that discovery incomplete. Small cells are especially effective: they make the system's scale visible by placing related forms next to one another at different sizes. A viewer can understand the operation without exhausting the image.

The bounded vocabulary is therefore a source of generosity. It gives the eye familiar parts to return to, while the selected tile sets and palettes allow those parts to take on different emphases. A horizontal arrangement, a looping network and a field of bright discs can remain recognisably related without being interchangeable. The individuality of an output lies in the behaviour of the whole field, not solely in one unusual accessory.

Preserving this work means retaining that relationship between rule and experience. The original program explains how a cell is divided; the image shows why that division matters. The mint record establishes when a particular result entered the edition; the artist's accounts explain the curiosity that brought the system into being. None of those records replaces looking. Together they let a small set of pieces remain a large and inviting problem.