WaVyScApE

The work and its context

WaVyScApE is project 406 on the Art Blocks V2 core contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, published under the canonical slug wavyscape-by-holger-lippmann and credited to Holger Lippmann. The indexed project record reports a completed edition of 315 of 315 invocations, runtime p5@1.0.0, and the official description: WaVyScApE wave flow vibrate oscillate swing waft drift float undulate surge meander... is it landscape? after years of living in cities, on a trip through the alps, i’ve been immersed in a beautiful landscape. i was shocked by this vastness, depth, rhythmic beauty... soft rolling hills that gently swing into each other, to the depths of overlying rugged ridges, followed by billowing cloud banks, this kind of loving frequency! was it then when the theme “landscape” became a constant companion of my work? maybe. nevertheless, it's not my ambition to create landscape illustrations. rather, through the joy of playing with code, many different abstract structures led me to this sort of linear turbulence, which can sometimes leave a pleasant impression of “familiarity”. however, an openness that stimulates the imagination has always been important to me. softly morphing blob shapes traveling horizontally and leaving their trails behind. creating virtual three-dimensional forms, layered over each other, building up staggered fields out of random color sequences of partly pre-defined color arrays. mixed and overlaid with white and greyscale palettes. when some remaining colorful structures shine through, sometimes, this reminds me of thawing snow in spring, when yellow and green grasses and early bloomers, or lost toys or trash suddenly appear. sometimes it's the case that when the picture is built up randomly, by chance, a beautiful colorful structure is suddenly overlaid with gray again, an appropriate allegory to the concealing snow or wrapped gifts, or similar things, and for whom i consider the secret to remain hidden. ... computer-based aesthetics have always had a strong fascination for me. in the early 90s, during my 2 year residency in new york i used to go into clubs and bars around the East village. once entered a small place with electronic music playing and animations beamed onto the wall. i couldn’t stop staring at these into-each-other-morphing structures. fractals! this was completely new to me, and i so was stunned! …waited till the end and talked to the couple who made it. they told me something about the apple-II computer and some software, but i barely understood anything. it was a pretty cold winter and i lived in williamsburg, so i went over the bridge and had this amazing starry city night around and inside me. i must have mumbled something like: i have to go for it, have to find out, have to start anew again… the next days, i talked to my girlfriend, and she encouraged me to call around at computer departments. maybe someone would have a clue. the first call i made was the institute of technology: “hold on, i’ll give you the art department,” and then there was this guy, “yeah, fractals! so you studied art in germany and want to learn something about computer graphics and fractals? come by next monday." i showed him my catalogs from galerie-gebr-lehmann.de, “this is bauhaus!, i love bauhaus!”. he offered me an internship. so i started working on an IBM workstation, somewhere in midtown, somewhere between the 30th and 40 floor, in front of 2 large workstations, one wall side completely glassed in, in the middle of all these thousands of block buildings. i stood extremely next to me; “where are you!?, what are you doing here!?” it exceeded my wildest dreams. ... over the years, working with code has not only become a practical technique, but also a factor that determines the aesthetics itself. or it was even the main reason, when i started with code, using a formal language and principle that's based on algorithmic functions, representing mathematical processes and simulations. which leave behind a kind of the machine's own characteristic design language, representing our culture in its essentials. to me it also offers sort of a meta-level of looking at/into nature. i'd call myself a code minimalist fascinated by bauhaus, constructivism and minimalism, i developed many if not most of my processing apps exclusively with basic shapes like circles, squares and lines. sometimes i caught myself doing e.g. programming a shadow only to take it home again after all, since it seemed to be tipping over stylistically somehow. such as. also in the "flower code" work series, where i developed the blossoms with detailed petal shapes, only to turn everything back again to only work with circles and lines, because i was horrified to realize that it immediately became naturalistic or even kinda cheesy, not what i wanted... holger lippmann, berlin nov. 2022 bauhaus small writing ¹²

Those figures are current index observations retrieved on 2026-09-19, not a reconstruction of the original public sale announcement. Atlas position is a catalogue ordinal and is not the on-chain project ID. The live collection page and the Hasura projects_metadata row agree on title, slug, contract, and project ID after a filtered query that used the exact slug. ¹²

Contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. Aspect ratio indexed as 0.625. Website https://e-art.co/wavyscape/.

This essay treats the stored artist program, four independently identified outputs, and a freshly checked AB5D holding (or an explicit collection gap) as primary evidence. Metadata traits are cited only when they were returned for the same V2 contract token IDs that were visually inspected. They do not replace looking at the pictures. ³⁴

Conception and development

The official project description is the development account used here. Interview or dossier sentences that name a different slug are not treated as statements about this series. WaVyScApE wave flow vibrate oscillate swing waft drift float undulate surge meander... is it landscape? after years of living in cities, on a trip through the alps, i’ve been immersed in a beautiful landscape. i was shocked by this vastness, depth, rhythmic beauty... soft rolling hills that gently swing into each other, to the depths of overlying rugged ridges, followed by billowing cloud banks,

The development account used here is the specific source named in the citations, not a paraphrase of an artist-dossier page. Where that account is an official project description written in the artist's voice, that limit is stated rather than upgraded into an unpublished studio diary. Where an interview exists, the sentences that actually name WaVyScApE are the ones relied on. ⁵¹

Secondary pages that only repeat the marketplace listing are not treated as independent conception sources. ²⁵

How the work was constructed

The complete artist program for slug wavyscape-by-holger-lippmann was retrieved from projects_metadata.script filtered by that exact slug. The UTF-8 payload is 7426 bytes with SHA-256 796dca7aaf7bd258a3801f80eae07ecb0923b6dd4a25e933b3b8fbc6fa94a77c. Runtime on the project record is p5@1.0.0. The script was read in full; it was not executed in this research session. ⁶

The stored generator is 7426 bytes, SHA-256 796dca7aaf7bd258a3801f80eae07ecb0923b6dd4a25e933b3b8fbc6fa94a77c, runtime p5@1.0.0. Detected source markers: setup, draw, noLoop, createCanvas, tokenData, hash, colorMode. Named functions include S, V, d, draw, setup, t, v. tokenData.hash is read in source. Output then follows the drawing path those functions implement. Token 0 observation: Inspected media-proxy PNG is 1500x2400px, light and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 202,201,203). File size 3190891 bytes. Indexed features: Colors Mostly Grayscale; Distance Close

Visual claims come from inspected media-proxy PNGs plus indexed token features.

Seed handling is visible in the retrieved program: tokenData.hash is read in source. Time and interaction behaviour in code is: Source contains noLoop. The inspected PNG is a finished still. Live motion was not stopwatched. A handler found in source is not the same thing as a control that was pressed in a live renderer during this session; tested controls are listed only when an actual key or pointer action was performed. ⁶⁷

External dependencies are those declared by script_type_and_version plus any library identifiers inside the file. Public visibility of the stored script does not grant a right to redistribute the raw artist source in this package, so the analysis cites functions and byte length rather than reprinting the program. ⁶⁸

The mint

Indexed chronology for project 406 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069 is as follows. First token minted_at is 2023-01-12T21:54:23+00:00. activated_at is 2023-01-26T16:57:35+00:00. start_datetime is 2023-02-01T18:00:00+00:00. completed_at is 2023-02-01T18:37:23+00:00. Invocations stand at 315 of a maximum 315, with complete=true on the retrieved row. ²³

Calculated intervals from those timestamps: first mint to activation is 13.79 days; activation to start_datetime is 6.04 days; start_datetime to completion is 37.4 minutes; first mint to completion is 19.86 days. These are differences of indexed clock fields, not a claim about when a web storefront button became visible to every collector. A first mint that precedes start_datetime is treated as an early or reserved mint unless a separate allocation record is produced. ²³

Indexed clocks: first 2023-01-12T21:54:23+00:00, activated 2023-01-26T16:57:35+00:00, start 2023-02-01T18:00:00+00:00, completed 2023-02-01T18:37:23+00:00. Early first-mint timestamps are not labelled reserved without a separate allocation record.

Historic per-token ETH prices for the original public sale were not recovered from a primary price table during this session and remain unresolved. Any floor price visible on a marketplace page in 2026 is a current listing observation, not the 2021 ask. ¹²

Copyright and licensing

The project record stores the artwork licence label 'CC 4.0'. That string includes an explicit 4.0 version and is treated as Creative Commons version 4.0. Code rights for the artist program are not separately labelled on the same field; they are treated as unknown rather than assumed identical to the artwork deed. ²⁸

Artwork label copied exactly as 'CC 4.0'.

Third-party runtime p5@1.0.0 is a separate rights object from both the artwork outputs and the artist source. p5.js, three.js, and ordinary browser JavaScript each keep their own licence texts. This package does not redistribute those libraries. ⁶⁸

Original essay prose in this package is dedicated CC0-1.0 by the research operator. That dedication does not change the artwork, code, or dependency licences.

Close reading of examples

WaVyScApE #0 is token 406000000 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-01-12T21:54:23+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 1500x2400px, light and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 202,201,203). File size 3190891 bytes. Indexed features: Colors Mostly Grayscale; Distance Close Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Colors Mostly Grayscale; Distance Close. ³⁹⁴

WaVyScApE #1 is token 406000001 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-02-01T18:22:47+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 1500x2400px, mid-tone and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 172,132,157). File size 5012052 bytes. Indexed features: Colors Full Color; Distance Nearby Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Colors Full Color; Distance Nearby. ³⁹⁴

WaVyScApE #10 is token 406000010 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-02-01T18:35:11+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 1500x2400px, light and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 191,174,183). File size 3958564 bytes. Indexed features: Colors Mostly Color; Distance Close Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Colors Mostly Color; Distance Close. ³⁹⁴

WaVyScApE #20 is token 406000020 on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069, minted 2023-02-01T18:35:35+00:00. The canonical token page returned HTTP 200. The inspected media-proxy PNG is a static frame. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 1500x2400px, light and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 199,181,188). File size 5174389 bytes. Indexed features: Colors Mixed; Distance Far Indexed features returned for this V2 token: Colors Mixed; Distance Far. ³⁹⁴

The AB5D header candidate is token 406000291 (edition 291), currently indexed to 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045, which is one of the three linked addresses returned for username ab5d on 2026-09-19. That ownership match is a present-tense index observation, not proof of continuous custody since mint. Inspected media-proxy PNG is 1500x2400px, light and muted or near-neutral (mean RGB 186,173,184). File size 3775882 bytes. Indexed features: Colors Mostly Color; Distance Close ¹⁰³⁴

Motion, interaction, and audio: Source contains noLoop. The inspected PNG is a finished still. Live motion was not stopwatched. The static PNGs document halt or preview states. They are not by themselves proof that a live loop is still running, nor proof that a work is silent. No soundtrack was heard from these pages during this session. ⁴⁷⁶

Significance and limitations

WaVyScApE is project 406 by Holger Lippmann on 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. The close readings above are the evidence for what the stored program outputs.

Unresolved research questions that remain after this pass: (1) What was the exact public-sale unit price in ETH at start_datetime, supported by a contemporaneous primary source rather than a later floor? (2) For tokens whose live renderer was not stopwatch-timed, what is the measured wall-clock period of one full cycle or one completed progressive draw? (3) What contemporaneous primary source records the original public unit price in ETH? (4) Incomplete Control aside, do any of the three current AB5D wallets later acquire or dispose of the header token used above after 2026-09-19? ²¹⁰⁷

This package is a draft for human review. Structural validation tests file shape, not the truth of seeing or of licence interpretation.