Woman, Life, Freedom

The work and its context

Woman, Life, Freedom is project 468 on the Art Blocks contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. The index records 37 invocations against a maximum of 37, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 1.44, the vertical "presents" and the licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ¹. Art Blocks lists it as an Art Blocks 500 release in the Presents category, released on 14 September 2023 ².

Fatemi calls it "a narrative work, documenting the ongoing revolution in Iran" ¹³. The revolution is the uprising that followed the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini on 16 September 2022, three days after her arrest by Iran's morality police ⁴. Every output is a night street in an Iranian city, built from grey paper-cut shapes: tower blocks with lit windows, shuttered shops, a mosque, walls covered in handwritten slogans. White figures of protesters stand on a narrow strip of pavement, and brown, bat-winged clerics hover in the sky ¹.

The artist wanted "the spotlight on the bravery of the people" rather than on the regime. The mullahs, in her words, are "bat-like ambassadors of the Iranian regime, hovering just above the ground and shrouded in darkness" ¹³. The record also commits 10 per cent of primary proceeds to the MyShare4Freedom campaign. That campaign supports people hurt in the movement, "especially those who lost their eyesight due to being shot with lead pellets" ¹.

The work is unusual on Art Blocks in three ways. It is documentary, not abstract. It is interactive, with clickable figures and slogans that open explanatory text. And it is animated without end: characters walk on and off the stage in a sequence that differs on every viewing ¹³.

Conception and development

Fatemi is an Iranian artist based in London. Her site calls her "a London-based Iranian Artist engaging with political and social ideas" ⁵. Art Blocks' profile says her practice explores "socio-political issues, examined specifically from a feminist and an autobiographical point of view" ⁶. Her own account says she moved into blockchain and generative art during the Covid-19 lockdown. Her first on-chain project, Project Mahin, followed her mother's breast cancer diagnosis ³. Cointelegraph reported in March 2021 that Project Mahin assigned diagnoses to 60 illustrated breasts using Chainlink randomness, and that all royalties went to Breast Cancer Now ⁷. So the charitable model of Woman, Life, Freedom had a precedent in her work.

VERSE's 2022 interview presents BYMA as the partnership of Fatemi and Michael Elsdörfer, a couple. It describes her as a conceptual artist drawn to "traditional carpet weaving techniques from the country of her birth, Iran" ⁸. Elsdörfer describes himself there as "a fabricator who writes code, or someone to bounce ideas off of" ⁸. Under BYMA the pair released Two Mathematicians on Art Blocks Factory on 8 February 2022, 300 outputs based on Islamic geometric patterns ⁹. VERSE also showed two BYMA works, Farbspiel #1 and #2 (2022), in its group show "Chromatics" ¹⁰. Her current statement says: "I merge weaving and creative code to craft textiles, objects, and installations" ⁵.

She says she has been working on Woman, Life, Freedom "since October 2022" ³. The project statement lists the emotions of following the protests from abroad: "exhaustion from the daily news of atrocities, guilt for being safe and not being able to help" ¹³. The figures are drawn from news and social media footage, and the project page reproduces some of that footage with a content warning. It names, for example, Ghazal Ranjkesh, who "lost her eyesight after being shot in one eye" ³.

Three design decisions are documented. She first considered the colours of the Iranian flag, but found the themes "were not limited to Iran alone". In her words, the concept of women's courage "is universal" ³. She dropped a planned set of daytime scenes, "since most of the protests have been taking place at night". She calls night "a powerful metaphor for the brutality of Iranian regime" ³. And she chose the slogans "with the help of some experts" ³. The page also has a sheet of all the figures in progress ³.

How the work was constructed

The on-chain program is 11 script parts that concatenate to 170,789 bytes, SHA-256 2a829c6cfd98daf4129c749169d1a5bd4be4c81c632eb294d274a96f4a547d38. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

Nearly all of those bytes are data. About 4.5 KB of the script is a small decompressor of the kind found in the fflate library. The other 166 KB is a single base64 string holding gzip-compressed JavaScript. At load the string is inflated to 305,740 bytes of source, which is then run with eval (own decoding of the script) ¹. The inflated program contains three kinds of material:

• A drawing engine. A cut-down port of rough.js makes every shape look hand-cut, plus two WebGL shaders that add paper grain and a spotlight.
• A cast. About 550 SVG path strings of more than 60 characters each describe the figures, their animation frames, the slogans and the buildings.
• A text corpus. Paragraphs of English explain each figure and slogan, with the transliterated Persian or Kurdish of each chant.

Fatemi's page explains why. Shapes were simplified to straight lines where possible, and the rough effect was added at runtime to save bytes. A custom Python generator turned her Illustrator drawings into p5 code ³. Her page gives the total size of the scripts as "roughly half a megabyte". It says testnet deploys still used "something around 93 million units of gas, costing roughly 2.5 ETH" ³. The compressed script on chain is about a third of that size.

The program seeds two alternating 32-bit generators from the two halves of the token hash ¹. The index publishes no features for this project; every token's feature list is empty ¹. The table therefore gives the program's own weights, with counts from a Python reimplementation of the setup draws run over all 37 hashes. That simulation matched the published renders for every token checked, including all mullah counts, fires and star skies (own computation) ¹.

The layers are then built back to front: sky, moon or star text, mountains, up to four rows of towers, then the street. On the street, walls, shops and houses are laid side by side, and one mosque is allowed ¹. Walls take a slogan 90 per cent of the time, and shops are sometimes sealed with a red "polomb" notice ¹. Up to three groups of static figures are placed in gaps between slogans, and live walkers fill any remaining places up to a limit of three (code reading) ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

1. The windows spell the title in Morse code. Each lit window can occasionally switch to a pale cream and blink out "woman life freedom" in Morse, at 400 milliseconds per unit. A window is chosen roughly once every eight hours per window, and up to four can blink at once. The effect is driven by the viewer's own random numbers, so it differs on every viewing (code reading) ¹.
2. Every weighted choice burns a random number. The helper that picks from a weighted list draws one number, discards it, and draws a second to decide. It is harmless, but every weighted pick in the work costs two draws. Any reimplementation must copy this to match the renders (code reading, confirmed by the simulation) ¹.
3. The whole scene is redrawn from the same seed every frame. Each frame resets the generator to an identical state derived from the hash. The skyline, slogans and static figures are therefore rebuilt identically 60 times a second. Only the walkers, windows and mullahs, which draw on the browser's own randomness or on time, change ¹.
4. A rare landmark. On the front street, a 3 per cent branch replaces the buildings of the front street with a white silhouette of Tehran's Azadi ("Freedom") Tower. Among the 37 renders it appears only on #34 (code reading and own inspection of renders) ¹.
5. An overlap check that looks at the wrong figure. When a walker decides whether it may stop and stand, it checks for overlap with other standing walkers. The check reads a position the model object does not have, so any other standing walker blocks it, wherever that walker is (code reading) ¹.
6. The scroll wheel is never released. Opening a text panel adds a wheel listener that blocks page scrolling. The listener is stored in a way that always leaves it undefined, so a new one is added on each click. The removal call also targets the document rather than the window, so none is ever removed (code reading) ¹.
7. Rules visible in the outputs. A star-written sky never has mullahs, and it caps the height of buildings and mountains so the stars stay clear. The Khodanoor scene suppresses every other figure, and #27 has none. The girl in the wheelchair, who is spraying a wall, is withheld when no ordinary wall slogan exists ¹.
8. Shared and duplicated texts. The walking scarf-waver uses the same paragraph as the static Saqez funeral figure. Two figures share the Sistan and Baluchestan text. "Woman, Life, Freedom" exists as three slogan drawings, in Persian twice and in Kurdish once ¹.
9. Leftovers. A variable that forces a fire is always false. A counter in the figure picker is always zero. The key "f" toggles a frame-rate readout. The rough.js port keeps a replace call that passes a string where a regular expression was meant (code reading) ¹.
10. Typos in the texts. The mint description says characters are "entering and existing the stage". The in-work texts include "seccession", "not permitted to to register", and "an Arabic world" for "word" ¹.

The most coveted variants

The market for this edition is thin. No auction appearance, record sale or collector commentary was found. At retrieval the only listing was at 0.7 ETH ¹². OpenSea's collection page, read on 21 September 2026, showed total traded volume of about $2,600, a best offer of about $80 and 26 owners ¹¹. Its last-sale figures are shown only in dollars and without dates, and they differed between the collection and item pages, so no sale price is given here. The variants below are therefore the rarest structures in the code and the index, not a market consensus.

The star-written sky (3 of 37). On #4, #5 and #25, about 2,100 stars trace "zan, zendegi, azadi" across the sky in handwritten Persian. #4 and #25 have almost no skyline beneath (own computation and renders) ¹.

Khodanoor (1 of 37). On #27 a young man sits tied beneath a flagpole with a white flag, beside a mosque, and nobody else is on the street. The program's text tells the story of Khodanoor Lajaei. It describes him as shot during the Zahedan crackdown, hands tied to a flagpole with water "just placed out of reach" ¹. Fatemi's "Character Footage" section includes an image whose file is named "Khodanour" ³.

The Azadi Tower (1 of 37). #34 is the only output in which the front street becomes the tower. Protesters stand in front of it and two mullahs circle above ¹.

Fire and full skies. Seven outputs have the burning-hijab fire (#6, #9, #23, #24, #25, #31, #33). #25 is the only one that combines fire with a star sky. Five have three mullahs (#16, #17, #28, #29, #30). All of these counts are from the simulation, checked against the renders ¹.

Invocation 0. #0 was minted on 6 September 2023, eight days before release, and is still held by the artist's address ¹.

The cast: figures, slogans and the stories behind them

The program's texts are the work's own documentary layer. They open in a panel when a figure or slogan is clicked, and the rest of the scene dims under a spotlight shader ¹. The static cast has fourteen figures (code reading). Among them are a tar player recalling the Ekbatan girls' "Calm Down" dance, the girl in the wheelchair, a veiled and an unveiled woman hand in hand, a woman injured in the eye, a mourner from Amini's funeral in Saqez, Baluch and Kurdish figures, a schoolgirl in a gas mask for the poisonings, a "Girl of Enghelab Street" and the kissing couple of Shiraz ¹. The placard bearer carries "Mahsa Amini", "Woman, Life, Freedom" or a rainbow flag, whose text addresses the criminalisation of same-sex relations ¹.

The 22 wall slogans run from "Woman, Life, Freedom" and "Down with the dictator" to "Hope can not be hanged", each with a translation and a transliteration ¹. The texts date themselves. One notes seven official executions "at the time this text was written", and another cites more than 506 dead as of 22 November 2022 ¹. Figures differ from outside reporting in places. The program gives about 100 dead at Zahedan, while the summary retrieved from Wikipedia gives forty ¹⁴.

MyShare4Freedom and the work beyond the screen

The charitable-giving record pledges 10 per cent of primary proceeds to MyShare4Freedom ¹. The GoFundMe page, read on 21 September 2026, is organised by Dorreh Khatibi-Hill with two co-organisers, Elnaz Bardia and Bibi Kasrai. It was created on 10 April 2023, five months before the release. It showed £70,188 raised from 1,463 donations against a goal of £100,000 ¹². The page names no donors from Art Blocks or the NFT world. The size of Fatemi's gift cannot be checked from it, and the release price is not in the index ¹²¹.

No exhibition or physical edition of Woman, Life, Freedom was found. Fatemi's CV and exhibitions page list no showing of it ⁵. Her 2024 entry, "Weave By Numbers" in Marfa, was a separate work. The Art Blocks Marfa Weekend programme (14 to 17 November 2024) describes it as "a performance in which the audience instructs the artist on how to weave a Persian rug", held at Saint George Hall ¹³. It shows the carpet-weaving side of her practice, not this project. No print programme, video or press review of the work was found.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 6 September 2023 at 17:56:23 UTC, and the project was activated at 19:20:11 UTC that day ¹. The public start was 14 September 2023 at 17:00 UTC. The first public mint came at 17:17:35 UTC. Thirteen tokens were minted within an hour of the start, 23 within a day and 28 by the end of September ¹. The edition then sold slowly:

• one token in October 2023
• five in December 2023, all within a minute on 21 December
• one each in January, April and September 2024 ¹

The last, #36, was minted on 12 September 2024, although the index records completion on 6 March 2025 ¹. The index price field reads 0 and does not record the release price ¹. At retrieval the 37 tokens were held by 26 addresses. The largest held five, and the AB5D wallet 0xdd19…c045 holds #13 ¹. No source ties any of the other addresses to a named collector, DAO or institution, so none is named here.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹. On that licence the images may be shared and adapted for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, if adaptations carry the same licence. The label is attached to the project as a whole, and the program carries no separate code licence ¹. The in-work texts refer to real, named people and to photographs and videos taken by others. The licence on the outputs does not extend to those source images. The images from Fatemi's project page are hotlinked here with credit and need permission for any reuse beyond reference ³.

Significance and limitations

Woman, Life, Freedom is a rare case of long-form generative art used for reportage. It holds a cast of real protest images, a small archive of explanatory texts and a slogan corpus inside a compressed on-chain program. Its randomness decides which stories each owner's street tells. Its hidden details, such as Morse-code windows and handwriting written in stars, reward close watching ¹³. It also continues a line in Fatemi's practice, after Project Mahin, of tying an on-chain release to a named cause ⁷¹. The research is limited. Searches found no dated sale record, collector commentary, exhibition, interview, podcast or video about this work. Its reception seems to have stayed within its 26 holders and the artist's own documentation ¹¹¹.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What was the release price, and what have the rare outputs (#4, #5, #25, #27, #34) sold for? OpenSea gave only undated dollar figures that disagree between pages ¹¹. An on-chain sales history (for example, from the minter contract's events) would settle both.
2. How much of the primary proceeds reached MyShare4Freedom, and when? The GoFundMe page does not show it ¹². X/Twitter posts by the artist (Instagram and Threads handle @armaghan90ftm) or by Art Blocks around 14 September 2023 are the likeliest leads, but they could not be read.
3. Did Michael Elsdörfer, who VERSE says writes the code for BYMA, build this program? The index gives no creative credit, and the release is under Fatemi's name alone ⁸¹.
4. Why does the index date completion to March 2025, six months after the last mint?
5. Every quotation from Fatemi's project page, artist site and CV, from VERSE, from the Marfa programme and from GoFundMe was taken through automated WebFetch extraction. They matched on two separate fetches of the project page but should be checked against the live pages before publication. An earlier claim that the figure sheet shows a pickup truck absent from the program was dropped, because the image could not be inspected ^3851312.

Bibliography