Utopia

The work and its context

Utopia is project 15 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 256 invocations against a maximum of 256, the runtime label js@na (plain JavaScript, no library), an aspect ratio of 1:1, the licence label "NIFTY License" and a price field of 0.15 ETH ¹. Art Blocks lists it in the Playground category and in the Art Blocks 500, the platform's closed set of 500 projects from 2020 to 2025 ²³.

The project text is two sentences of science fiction: "We were succeeding at creating a reflect of the old home place in our new land. We hoped we had not re-created our mistakes" ¹. The unidiomatic "reflect" is in the original.

Each output is a real-time WebGL scene. A single monument stands at the centre of a square city of stepped, twisting spires, lit by one of twenty sky colours and three kinds of light. A white shaft of light rises from the monument. The camera slowly orbits, and the viewer can drag, pinch or scroll to fly around and into the city ¹. The work was an early example of interactive 3D on Art Blocks, and Druid's "Art Blocks 101" guide of April 2021 singled it out: "Do yourself a favor and look at one of those pieces live" ⁴.

Conception and development

Gerard Ferrandez, who works as ge1doot, is described by Art Blocks as a "Toulouse-based generative artist and IT manager in the aerospace industry" ⁵. In his Art Blocks interview with Jeff Davis he recalled learning on 8-bit computers from type-in magazine listings, and starting with video games before moving to generative art ⁶. He described the process he still follows: "during the coding process, after many empirical 'try-fail-modify' iterations, my code will tend to do its own thing" ⁶.

The same interview names his two main technical influences, Chris Coyne's Context Free Art and Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen's Structure Synth. Both describe images as recursive grammars of shapes. Ferrandez said he "ended up developing my own context free ecosystem in pure JS without the need of writing a parser, the rules being stored as native JS objects" ⁶. Utopia's program is built exactly that way, as the next section shows (code reading) ¹. The interview also reproduces an undated work titled Our New Land, which shares the phrase "new land" with Utopia's description ⁶⁷. No source seen ties the two works together in code.

Utopia was one of Ferrandez's first three Art Blocks projects, all released in January and February 2021 ⁸. The first, Ignition (project 9), is called in the interview "the first 3D interactive WebGL NFT fully on-chain, with no external libraries or dependencies" ⁶⁹. Utopia followed in the same self-contained idiom. Anna Wolf's 2021 profile describes his wider output as "dark factory aesthetic and empty futuristic cities", and reports work in the ZKM and in the Anne + Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection ⁸. The ZKM claim is confirmed for his other projects, not for Utopia (see Notable collectors). The Spalter claim could not be confirmed.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single minified script of 11,937 bytes, SHA-256 75a12aa0e2193b00c9136f3edd0c9a9230e6d591d73c72d49575f4da24765c2a. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

It contains everything it needs: a small matrix library, a camera, a pointer and touch controller, two shaders and a rule engine. There is no p5.js or three.js ¹. A xorshift generator is seeded from the first fourteen hex digits of the token hash. Its first five draws fix the whole identity of the piece, in this order: the direction of the automatic orbit, the sky entry, the structure, and two hidden 5 per cent switches ¹.

The scene is written as a context-free grammar. Each rule is a JavaScript method that places a box, a pyramid or a flat panel and then calls other rules on transformed copies of itself, down to a depth limit ¹⁶. Four square city tiles are laid out around the centre. Each tile subdivides like a quadtree, six or seven levels deep. Every leaf becomes a spire: a stack of slabs that shrink a little and turn by 3 degrees at each storey, continuing with a probability of eight in nine (code reading) ¹. That is where the stepped, screw-like towers come from.

I reproduced the generator in Python and ran it on all 256 hashes. The first five draws predict every published trait exactly, with no exceptions ¹.

The six structures are simple solids made monumental. The Pyramid is a single great pyramid. Ether is two pyramids meeting at a white band, a diamond. The Skyscraper is a recursion of rotating slabs. The Laser tower is a dark block crossed by two white beams that run to the horizon. The Nuclear plant is four tapering towers, each with its own beam. The Generator is a fractal of cubes nested inside cubes (code reading) ¹.

Time changes the lighting model, not just the colour. Day uses a side light and a warm fog. Night thins the fog, adds a strong specular light and, for about half the city's leaves, a white lit window. Dawn switches every light off, so the city and monument become pure silhouettes against the sky, as in #5 below (code reading) ¹. White elements are drawn with a reserved colour value that bypasses lighting and fog. That is why the beams and windows stay bright in every sky ¹. The fragment shader adds a vignette and a per-frame film grain, so the live image never quite holds still ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked by simulation against all 256 token records, found the following.

1. "UFO" is a flag with two vetoes. The first hidden switch comes up 5 per cent of the time. When it is on, some spire tops end in a flat dark panel floating above the tower, which fills the sky with hovering plates. Nine hashes set the switch, but the program turns it off for Generators (#120 and #249), and the second hidden switch also suppresses it. The remaining seven are exactly the seven published UFOs: #67, #77, #94, #145, #200, #226 and #230 ¹.
2. An unlabelled structure on three Pyramids. The second hidden switch, also 5 per cent, is on for seven tokens. On a Pyramid it grows a mass of long, branching chains of boxes that hang and coil above the monument. On Night and Dawn skies these carry white windows. This happens on #102, #221 and #254 ¹. The metadata has no trait for it, so the most visually distinctive Utopias in the edition look ordinary to a trait filter.
3. The same switch darkens four Night cities. Wherever the second switch is on, the lit windows of Night are skipped. #102, #149, #190 and #254 are therefore Night scenes without the white window lines that mark the other 90 (code reading, confirmed on the renders of #102 and #254) ¹.
4. Sky names cover different colours, and one entry is doubled. Day Orange appears twice in the list with identical values, so it has double weight. At 27 tokens, Day Orange is the largest single time and colour pairing ¹. "Blue" is three different colours, one each for Day, Night and Dawn. "Orange", "Yellow", "Green", "Purple" and "Sepia" are also shared across times. Cyan, Grey and Black occur only at Night, while Neon and Black & White occur only by Day. Dawn has only four skies: Yellow, Orange, Blue and Sepia ¹. The rarest sky, Cyan (7), is a single Night entry.
5. A camera setting that is immediately overwritten. The lighting setup for Night and Dawn levels the camera pitch, but the start-up routine resets the pitch straight afterwards. The line has no effect (code reading) ¹.
6. Nine Utopias turn the other way. Its very first draw gives 5 per cent of outputs a reversed orbit. They are #16, #77, #105, #114, #115, #123, #175, #234 and #242 ¹. Any drag stops the orbit for good. The space bar then restarts it, always in the default direction, so on those nine it reverses the original motion (code reading).
7. A hidden wireframe mode. If the pointer is held down for about 240 frames, some four seconds at 60 frames per second, the solid faces are removed a slice at a time until only line edges remain. Releasing the pointer rebuilds them (code reading) ¹.
8. A coarse random generator. Each draw is reduced to one of only 1,000 values. The 56-bit seed is also rounded to floating point and then cut to 32 bits, so most of the hash is never read. All 256 seeds are still distinct ¹.
9. An unlabelled light direction. The Day and Night key light falls from the left or right, 123 and 133 tokens respectively, which mirrors the shading. This choice is not published as a trait (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No public collector survey of Utopia was found. The notes below rest on the published rarities, the program and the renders ¹¹⁰.

UFO (7 of 256). The only published rarity above one in twenty. #226, a Day Yellow Laser tower, shows the effect clearly: dozens of dark plates hanging in the air above the city. #77 combines a UFO with a reversed orbit, which makes it the only token with both ¹.

The chain Pyramids (3 of 256, unlabelled). #221, #102 and #254 are the only outputs with the coiling chains of quirk 2. #221 sets them against a pale Day Yellow sky. #254 is a Night Green Pyramid whose chains carry lit windows while the city below stays dark ¹. Nothing in the metadata or on marketplaces identifies them, so they are a find for collectors who look at the art rather than the trait list.

Rare skies. The smallest sky groups are Cyan (7), Black (8), Grey (10) and Black & White (12) ¹. #9 is a Cyan Night Generator: a teal haze, with the lit windows drawing white lines across the dark city.

Dawn silhouettes (45 of 256). With the lights off, Dawn outputs read as flat cut-outs, closer to a poster than a model. #5 shows two of the Nuclear plant's four towers black against a blue glow ¹.

Ether (33 of 256). The least common structure, and the most abstract: a floating diamond split by light. #6 is a Day Green example ¹.

Market data. At retrieval the index gave a lowest listing of 1.8 ETH, and Art Blocks showed four listings from that price ¹². OpenSea's collection page reported about $554,000 in total volume, a 7.5 per cent creator fee and 79 unique owners ¹⁰. The owner count matches the index ¹. The same page's list of "top sales" named #216 and #21, but their item pages give undated last sales of $1,431.92 and $2,323.05, so the list has not been relied on here ¹⁰¹¹¹². No auction sale or reported record trade of a Utopia was found. The owners of the rare tokens above are anonymous addresses, and no source names them.

Notable collectors

At retrieval the 256 tokens were spread across 79 addresses. The largest held 41, the next two 24 each, and 46 addresses held a single Utopia ¹. The 41-token wallet holds runs of consecutive numbers, including #71 to #78, #120 to #130 and #235 to #255 ¹. That pattern suggests it bought in bulk around the mint, but the index data used here does not show minters. No source links any of these wallets to a named person or institution.

AB5D holds #4, a Day Yellow Laser tower. The Art Blocks token page shows its owner as AB5D ¹³¹. The artist's address still holds one token, #0 ¹.

Institutions. No institution was found to hold a Utopia. The ZKM in Karlsruhe collects Ferrandez, but through his other Art Blocks projects. Its 2021 show "CryptoArt: It's Not About Money" displayed Ignition #268, #390 and #449 and R3sonance #56 and #440 ¹⁴. The ZKM's Daniel Heiss has said the museum "collected the first Art Blocks drops", naming Ignition among them ¹⁵. Ferrandez was then listed among the artists of the ZKM collection show "Writing the History of the Future" at the Gwangju Museum of Art (17 December 2021 to 3 April 2022). The listing does not name the work ¹⁶. Sotheby's "Natively Digital" sale of June 2021 included a 19-work Art Blocks lot with Ignition #185, but no Utopia ¹⁷. The Spalter collection's online catalogue returned no ge1doot work in the searches made for this draft.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 7 February 2021 at 14:36:30 UTC, eight minutes before the index's activation time of 14:44:33, and remains at the artist's address ¹. The public mint opened at 20:30:30 UTC. The remaining 255 were minted by 20:33:04 UTC, two minutes and 34 seconds later (my computation from the index) ¹. The index's price field is 0.15 ETH. No launch announcement confirming the original price was found ¹⁷.

Copyright and licensing

The index records "NIFTY License" with no link ¹. The earlier AB5D essay found no linked terms either ⁷. Art Blocks' own licensing guide of June 2021 identifies "NIFTY" as the NFT License 2.0, drafted by Dapper Labs in 2018 and the licence most used on Art Blocks ¹⁸. That text leaves all intellectual property with the creator. It lets owners use the art "for your own personal, non-commercial use" and sell merchandise up to "$100,000 in gross revenue each year". It forbids modifying the art or using it to promote other products ¹⁹. Neither source says that this version applies to Utopia in particular. The program is on-chain and carries no separate code licence. It depends only on the browser's own WebGL ¹. Renders in this essay come from the Art Blocks media proxy and are used for reference.

Significance and limitations

Utopia is an early, complete demonstration of a context-free grammar running as a live 3D scene on Art Blocks, written by an artist who built his own grammar engine ⁶¹. Its sky-and-light system gives the edition a wide range of moods from a small program. Its interactivity, which Druid recommended to new collectors in 2021, is essential: the static render shows one frame of one orbit ⁴.

The clearest new finding is the gap between the metadata and the program. The published "UFO" is a 5 per cent flag with two exceptions. A second hidden flag produces the edition's most dramatic images on three Pyramids, darkens four Night cities, and has no label at all ¹.

The limits of this draft are its sources. Beyond one interview, one profile and one beginner's guide, little has been written about Utopia. No market history beyond aggregate figures could be verified.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Did ge1doot intend the chain structure on #102, #221 and #254 as a hidden feature, and did anyone name it? His X account (@ge1doot) is the likeliest source but cannot be read directly.
2. What is the date of the Jeff Davis interview (the earlier AB5D essay gives 6 January 2021), and is Our New Land a study for Utopia? The interview quotations here come from automated WebFetch extraction and should be checked against the page.
3. What are Utopia's notable sales, with dates? Only undated last-sale figures and aggregate volume were found ¹⁰¹¹¹².
4. Did Ferrandez choose NFT License 2.0 for Utopia specifically, and was 0.15 ETH the launch price?
5. Which ge1doot work, if any, does the Spalter collection hold, and which work was shown in Gwangju ⁸¹⁶?

Bibliography