Art Blocks Project #0 · 2020
Chromie Squiggle
For Chromie Squiggle (2020), I created a system of 10,000 on-chain generative artworks that would help establish technical standards for a new generation of blockchain-based artists, coders, and collectors.
Chromie Squiggle used Ethereum’s transaction hash entropy to provide on-demand randomness for any algorithmically generated work, while also simultaneously storing the algorithm and all elements to recreate the artwork directly on the Ethereum blockchain.
Put simply, both the artwork's creation and its permanent storage live forever on Ethereum.
Background
Turn the knob to choose a type, then press the red button for another Squiggle. Click the artwork to pause or play. These controls are based on the device SquiggleDAO built for MACBA in Buenos Aires.
From a tile shop to Project #0
Before Art Blocks, I worked with ceramic tile and made experiments with projected light. I kept coming back to color. The early Squiggles were another way of working with it, this time by having code draw a 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.
I kept working on the algorithm between those early prints in 2018 and the Art Blocks release.
On November 27, 2020, I launched Art Blocks, a marketplace for on-demand, on-chain generative art. Chromie Squiggle, the generative script I had been developing for two years, was uploaded to Ethereum as Art Blocks Project #0.
I believed the 10,000-piece collection could serve as a colorful proof of concept for on-demand generative artwork on Ethereum. Each collector’s mint would help determine a unique output, with the script and its seed preserved on-chain so the artwork could be recreated.
The early prints · 2018
A working prototype · 2018
Inspired by the technical innovations of CryptoPunks and my own passion for generative art, I began to brainstorm ways to extend Larva Labs’ innovations.
I shared these ideas about blockchain-based procedural randomness first inside the CryptoPunks Discord, and later on social media. In September 2018, two years before Chromie Squiggle launched on Art Blocks, I tweeted a working prototype that brought these ideas together.
The prototype tweet
An archived screenshot supplied by Derek. The displayed date is September 16, 2018.
Six ways of drawing the line
One example of each type. Open any of them to look closer, or try the same type in the selector above.
Normal
Slinky
Fuzzy
Ribbed
Bold
Pipe
Six ways to go hyper
Each of the six types can also be born hyper: the rainbow is compressed into a much shorter stretch of the line. These are variations of the original traits, not changes made after minting.
Hyperrainbow
Hyper-Slinky
Hyper-Fuzzy
Hyper-Ribbed
Hyper-Bold
Hyper-Pipe
The types, colors, and controls
Each Squiggle starts with a hash generated when it is minted. The algorithm uses that seed to choose its shape, type, starting color, color spread, and number of segments. I did not choose the individual outputs in advance.
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.
Download a Squiggle
Choose an artwork number to download a transparent SVG or PNG, or open its live view.
Pull these directly (for developers)
Every Squiggle lives at a predictable URL. Swap the token ID (0–9999) to pull any of the 10,000. All are transparent background and free to integrate.
- SVG vector
https://squiggle-svg.snowfro.net/1981.svg - 2400 PNG 2400 × 1600
https://squiggle-2400-png-transparent.snowfro.net/1981.png - 4800 PNG 4800 × 3200
https://squiggle-4800-png-transparent.snowfro.net/1981.png
Asset format: https://<bucket>/<tokenId>.<ext>
- Live renderer full screen
https://snowfro.com/squiggle-render/index.html?id=1981&animate=true
Renderer params: id (0–9999), animate (true / false), bg (0–10), speed (0.1–20), clear (true for a transparent background).
The pause, and the gifting era
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.
MoMA · one of the eight Squiggles donated by the community.
I gave them to collectors, artists, communities, employees, family, and museums. There are fewer Squiggles than there are people who deserve them. Announcements went out through Discord 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. When Venus Over Manhattan and I minted 300 of the last thousand, the entirety of each bid went to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
The farewell, and the final mint
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.
The last two
Held by the Farewell contract.
The final mint, gifted to LACMA.
Find your address in the Farewell
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.
Did you sign the Farewell? Check an address or ENS.
SquiggleDAO and the Squiggle Foundation
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.
Museum collections and places to see them
Individual Squiggles, gifted by me or placed by the community and the Squiggle Foundation, now live in museum collections around the world.
- LACMALos Angeles, US#9999The final Squiggle, a gift from me
- MoMANew York, US#9681, #6687, #2022, #8107, #4436, #1047, #292, #5465A full set, by community donation
- Toledo Museum of ArtToledo, Ohio, US#1458, #7884
- Moody Center for the Arts, RiceHouston, US#9950
- ZKM Center for Art and MediaKarlsruhe, Germany#72, #100, #108, #123
- FotografiskaStockholm, Sweden#9688
- Museum Francisco CarolinumLinz, Austria#4584
- Nxt MuseumAmsterdam, Netherlands#5049
- ICA MiamiMiami, US#3650
- Buffalo AKG Art MuseumBuffalo, New York, US#9994
- Museum of Art + LightKansas, US#9945
- MACBABuenos Aires, Argentina#8434
- PopCoTallinn, Estonia#4812
On display now
- MACBA · Buenos Aires, ArgentinaOn permanent display
Squiggle #8434 runs continuously on the physical selector device SquiggleDAO built, where visitors can dial up types and traits in the gallery.
- PopCo · Tallinn, EstoniaThrough summer 2027
Squiggle #4812 is on view as part of the museum's program.
Shows, objects, and other places the Squiggle has been
My debut gallery exhibition. It opened with 51 Squiggles shown on Infinite Objects frames, and the tour then traveled, showing 100 at a time in New York, Basel, and at NADA.
- Jamie xx in MarfaNov 2022
At the Art Blocks open house in an old cattle feed mill in Marfa, Texas, the Squiggles danced in sync with sound for the first time, an audio-reactive backdrop to a set by Jamie xx.
Chromie Squiggle #9951 shown in the gallery window and on a persistent livestream.
Squiggles took to the sky in the museum's first drone light show, alongside the Infinite Images exhibition.
- 800 lb Squiggle marble sculpture
A Squiggle carved in marble at architectural scale, an 800-pound sculpture realized through Glitch, which I supported as a donor.
- Squiggles across Manhattan
Squiggles ran on billboards and bus stops around New York City.
Polaroids
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.
The stream, browser extension, and hardware
- Live stream ↗An always-on Squiggle stream where you can pick which one appears, with a four-hour cooldown so everybody gets a turn.
- Chrome new-tab ↗A browser extension that fills each new tab with a random Squiggle.
- The rendererThe same code that powers the selector above renders any Squiggle live in the browser.
- Ported to hardwareSquiggles have run on a Game Boy Advance (the bridge into LIFT), an N64, and gallery display rigs, including the MACBA selector device.
Watch the live stream here
How the work is preserved
Chromie Squiggle is fully on-chain Art Blocks art. The useful consequence is that if the basic machinery for recovering any Art Blocks artwork survives, every Squiggle comes 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.
More on the Squiggle's history
Connections to the other work
- What you see
- An animated line
- What it contains
- An algorithm that generates the shape and color behavior of each artwork
- What came before
- My experiments with projected color and code
- Where it leads
- Work with animation, physical display, and preserving software
Edition, dates & provenance
- Art Blocks releaseconfirmed
- Art Blocks · Ethereum
0x059edd72cd353df5106d2b9cc5ab83a52287ac3a
The Art Blocks collection, museum records, community tools, and original sources are linked on this page.
Sources & research notes
Official / primary
- Art Blocks collection ↗
The official Chromie Squiggle reference for project facts and public links.
Useful for: project-facts · official-links
official project · primary · full text - Art Blocks algorithm guide ↗
Official documentation for Chromie Squiggle mechanics and technical context.
Useful for: mechanics · technical-context
official doc · primary · full text
Artist / institution / exhibition
- LACMA Unframed ↗
Institutional record: collection or exhibition evidence and provenance context.
Useful for: institutional-context · provenance
institution record · primary · full text - ISLAA spotlight ↗
Curatorial framing and exhibition context for the work.
Useful for: curatorial-context · exhibition-context
curatorial essay · supporting · full text - Glitch Marfa E30D Chromie essay ↗
Curatorial framing and exhibition context for the work.
Useful for: curatorial-context · exhibition-context
curatorial essay · supporting · full text - MoMA artist page ↗
Institutional record: collection or exhibition evidence and provenance context.
Useful for: institutional-context · provenance
institution record · primary · full text - Toledo Infinite Images ↗
Institutional record: collection or exhibition evidence and provenance context.
Useful for: institutional-context · provenance
institution record · primary · full text - Museum of Art + Light #9945 ↗
Institutional record: collection or exhibition evidence and provenance context.
Useful for: institutional-context · provenance
institution record · primary · full text - Fotografiska #1981 ↗
Institutional record: collection or exhibition evidence and provenance context.
Useful for: institutional-context · provenance
institution record · primary · full text - PoCo #4812 ↗
Institutional record: collection or exhibition evidence and provenance context.
Useful for: institutional-context · provenance
institution record · primary · full text
Community / learning
- SquiggleDAO Learn ↗
Community learning context and lore around the project.
Useful for: community-context · learning
community source · lead only · community source - SquiggleDAO Trait Explorer ↗
Community learning context and lore around the project.
Useful for: community-context · learning
community source · lead only · community source - Squiggle Foundation Learn ↗
Community learning context and lore around the project.
Useful for: community-context · learning
community source · lead only · community source