Chromie Squiggle

I spent the first part of my career working with ceramic tile, obsessed with how color and light behave. The Squiggle came out of that: an experiment in how a generative algorithm could draw a colorful line.

In 2018 I generated 2,000 of them, printed them, and gave them out to our La Nova Tile customers, some at a holiday party but most handed directly to clients, with a way to claim a digital version. Only 14 people claimed one with an Ethereum address. When Art Blocks launched on November 27, 2020, Chromie Squiggle was Project #0, and I sent those 14 early believers an official Squiggle.

The 2018 algorithm was simple. The 2020 version opened up the whole system: the types, the color behavior, and the variation that makes all 10,000 feel related but never repeated.

Each Squiggle is drawn by one algorithm, seeded by entropy generated the moment it is created. From that entropy come the type, the starting color, how fast color spreads, the number of segments, and more. Nobody, including me, knew what any given mint would look like before it happened.

There are six main types, Normal, Slinky, Fuzzy, Ribbed, Bold, and Pipe. Each of those can also be born 'hyper,' where the colors are significantly more compressed across the length of the Squiggle.

The interaction is part of the work. Click the live view of a Squiggle to start and stop the animation. Press the spacebar to cycle through shades of grey background tones, and use the up and down arrows to speed up or slow down the animation.

I released this project as an edition of 10,000 with no real notion that they would ever all be consumed. It felt like a huge number, and generative art on a blockchain was so esoteric that selling them all, even at $35 apiece, felt like an impossibility.

I stopped the minting when roughly 9,000 had sold. They were going too fast. I wanted to keep enjoying them, and I wanted to be able to give them out to people, new folks looking to discover generative or digital art. So once I stopped the minter, I set out to place the rest by hand over the next few years.

I gave them to people who did something I admired: collectors, artists, communities, employees, family, and museums. As I put it once, there are fewer Squiggles than there are people who deserve them. Announcements went out through our Discord announcement channel and on Twitter; some of the final ones were distributed by raffle to the Discord community.

Ten unminted Squiggles were auctioned for the ALS Association to raise money for the organization. And when Venus Over Manhattan and I minted 300 of the last thousand, we created an interesting mechanism where the entirety of each bid went to supporting the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

As the collection neared its end, a fellow artist and friend, Deafbeef, built a relic contract to commemorate the last Squiggle: the Squiggle Farewell. For one week in July 2024, anyone could sign it by sending a fraction of a cent of ETH, which was returned immediately, permanently recording their address. It was a deliberate nod to the earliest days of Ethereum, before wallets made any of this easy.

The second-to-last Squiggle, #9998, lives inside that Farewell contract to this day. The final one, #9999, I minted live on a call with LACMA on August 21, 2024, straight into the museum's wallet, which completed the edition of 10,000.

I also left a message inside the contract. To read it, open the contract on Etherscan, find the 'message' entry in the Read Contract list, and click it to reveal the text. It runs long, so you may want to copy and paste it somewhere to read the whole thing.

Chromie Squiggle is fully on-chain Art Blocks art, and that carries a quiet guarantee: if any single artwork across all of Art Blocks is preserved, then every Squiggle is preserved along with it.

Art Blocks artworks are required to be resolution-agnostic, so a Squiggle can be reproduced at any dimension without losing fidelity. The Squiggle script, its supporting library, and the template are all served fully on-chain, which means Art Blocks itself does not need to exist for the artwork to be recovered.

And a Squiggle can be recreated mathematically, by hand. One artist even drew Squiggles by hand using spirograph techniques, and the results are wonderful.

Chromie Squiggle grew a community that took on a life of its own. SquiggleDAO formed in 2021 to collect Squiggles and champion the project; membership means holding a Squiggle (or enough $SQUIG, or a SquiggleDAO NFT), and the group built tools like the trait explorer and the physical selector device for MACBA.

The Squiggle Foundation, a SquiggleDAO initiative, focuses on placing Squiggles in museums and telling the history. Much of the institutional collecting above happened through their work.

Over the years I printed and signed a few dozen physical Polaroids of Squiggles for people in the community, small one-off objects that often showed up on Twitter.

LACMA later commissioned 100 signed, editioned Polaroids, which the museum sold to raise funds.