How it works

Each work here is a program. What you see on a page is one drawing out of the many it can make, and what gets collected is the number that decides which one.

The program

I write every piece in my own code, from the renderer up. There are no drawing libraries in it. It draws in vector, as SVG, on a sheet 1920 by 2400 units, and only turns that into pixels at the last moment, at whatever size your screen asks for. Resize the window and it redraws at the new size.

The seed

A token carries a seed: 64 hexadecimal characters, fixed at the moment it is minted. The drawing is decided by that seed. Same seed, same drawing, every time, on any machine.

The seed is split into separate lanes, and each part of the work draws from its own. Colour comes from one, layout from another, the paper and the frame from others. That keeps the parts independent while a piece is being made: I can rework the paper without disturbing the colour.

Where it lives

Pattern Collapse and Out of Register are released on bootloader.art, on Tezos. The code for each is stored on IPFS, where a file’s address is a fingerprint of its contents, so the code cannot be swapped without the address changing. Each token sits on the Tezos contract KT1VJwe36…FdfqA, and its record points at that code with the seed and the edition number attached. Anyone can read it back and run it.

Every edition

Each minted edition has its own page here, with its seed, its links, and the program running that seed live in your browser. Pattern Collapse and Out of Register are both there in full.

Every version

A piece goes through dozens of versions before it is released, and I keep them all. The Algo page runs more than three hundred of them, across every project, so you can hold one seed and watch the code change underneath it.

Why vector

A vector drawing has no native size. It is a description of shapes, not a grid of pixels, so it redraws sharp at any scale. The released pieces export at up to six times their base size, 11520 by 14400 pixels, and that is only where the export stops, not where the drawing does. It is why prints can be made at whatever size the wall wants.