breathe

breathe is a program I wrote that draws one slow square at a time. It picks two colours, lays them across the square as a gradient, and then sets a short stroke turning through half a circle, three times, each turn a little lower on the page, leaving a sketchy line and a soft disc behind it and a dusting of grain after every turn. It takes about nine seconds, and then it stops. You are meant to sit with one for the length of a breath, and then another.

I write the code, and the code makes the pieces. Every piece starts from a sixty-four digit hash. The first colour is drawn from the hash and snapped to the nearest of twelve named hues; the second is that hue pushed along one channel. Most of the time that is all a piece gets, two hues melting into each other. Some get one more thing. Boxy ones split the field into blocks. Tubular ones draw the stroke as a chain of small circles, squares or triangles. Crisscross ones lay a fine grid of rings over everything, like a radar screen. Bubbly ones scatter small rings across the field. Tiny ones shrink the whole arrangement. A few go with black, or with white, and read as night or as paper.

The program made 333 of them for the mint, each rendered from its own hash to a still and a short loop, and stored on Arweave. Whoever minted got one of the 333 at random, and 221 were claimed before the mint closed. This site runs the same program live: the wall breathes a fresh piece from a fresh hash each time, and any hash you type runs the same way, in front of you. The minted tokens play their stored loops, since the chain records the piece and not the hash that made it.

The difficult part was never one good piece. It was writing a program that only made good ones, because the set was rendered before anyone chose, and there was no picking through it afterwards.