This article is a guest post by the prolific Alexis André and the incredible story of their Playground trilogy—Void, Messengers, and Obicera.
Let me give you some insights into the creative process of my first Art Blocks Playground trilogy.
Void
Void was very much a response to a personal revelation when it comes to thinking about each piece in terms of a broader collection instead of a set of independent mints. When I was doing 720 Minutes, I didn’t think collectors would want to get more than one.
I was proven very wrong.
Sometimes, rabid collecting happens on Art Blocks across projects, creating collections that share some common direction. You all know what I am talking about when I say ‘the monochrome collection.’ That really changed my perspective on the way this community experiences art.
Void started as an attempt to create a cohesive collection across all the individual mints, where you could line up two or three mints and find a story there. From the beginning, the theme for Void was to create planets and stars. A burst of matter against the emptiness of space. The technique was also chosen from the beginning—the project’s code name is ‘glowcircles’ on my computer.
Void was released as my first playground project, at a less hyped time when it took a whole week to mint all 500. This is, to this day, one of the best weeks I’ve had on the platform. The slow drip of the minter allowed everybody to explore each individual mint at a leisurely pace, and the reactions to the infamous “Time for Blood” binary star is something I will never forget.
The project id for Void is, of course, 42. If you don’t understand, you’ll need to do some homework before understanding the whole series because it only gets deeper, and we, of course, are using an Infinite Improbability Drive to get there.
Messengers
Void set the stage for the whole story. I had some stars, some planets, and the emptiness in between. Then, I started to work on my next piece, codename ‘scales.’ At this point, I was not planning to do a trilogy or connect the projects in any way.
I started the ‘scales’ project using some force-repulsion dynamics to generate the streaks you can see in Messengers. Reverse gravity, if you like. I did a lot of back and forth and had many passionate discussions with fellow artists about the nature of the piece, yet even late in the creative process, I was having trouble naming them. I remember calling them ‘Spirits,’ ‘Ghosts,’ or even ‘Dreams,’ but nothing really clicked.
At this point, the Messengers’ inner shape was based on a line slightly across the canvas, giving them this very peculiar form where sometimes there might be a head hidden somewhere. Then, I tried to start from a circle instead.
Everything. Made. Sense.
All the pieces started to fall in line. The aliens in ‘Arrival’ (you might have guessed by now I am extremely fond of sci-fi) used circles as their base structure for language. Wait. I have some stars and planets. I have those ethereal structures that share the same palettes with the stars and look organic. Now, what would be the name of ‘Arrival’ in Japanese?
メッセージ
Literally, ‘Message.’ That’s it then. Messengers it is. The idea formed there. Void would be the source of those lifeforms, those Messengers. They’re bringing us a message. The description reads:
“Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don’t talk to us. Yet.”
At this point, I had the story outline figured out. Void is the stars and planets. Messengers, well, are the aliens bringing us a message. What could it be? It meant a trilogy, and I needed a few more ideas to take everything to the next level.
Obicera
Let’s get back to this idea of set-making that really started the whole thing. It seems that collectors like the idea of triptychs, where you have three pieces aligned in a delightful manner. Chatting with Aaron Penne about future ideas (we bounced ideas against each other—the amount of respect between us makes it a no-brainer), it turned out we were both thinking along the same lines: we had the word triptych on the ‘things to look into’ list.
That’s how I started to work on the message. I wanted to create pieces with a strong structure to symbolize some unknown language and have a way to link two or three pieces together to form a triptych.
The idea was kind of interesting, but I was not sure if that particular way of connecting pieces would work across completely different mints or if they all would have the same overall structure. Not something that I wanted. Then, I had this crazy idea.
Then I started to think about the theme of the message. Contact/Arrival are movies that talked about aliens communicating with us. But wait, have we tried that? We have! The plot of Contact was very spot on. Contact begins at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, famous for hosting the SETI program until its tragic collapse not so long ago. And you know what also originated from Arecibo?
The Arecibo Message
Everything fits perfectly. We have sent a message meant to tell alien civilizations that we exist and have some knowledge of the universe. What would an alien civilization send back?
Obicera
Obviously, “Arecibo” backward. Now, what would be their message? Something that links across the whole mints. A…map. That’s it! The message is a map. A star map to the center of…I don’t know? Their homeworld? Their arch-nemesis planet? The answer to life, the universe, and everything?
At this point, I had awesome individual mints for Obicera, and the linked component was somehow the icing on the cake. I shared many test mints, but I don’t think anyone ever asked what those lines were for.
Then the remaining 10% of the piece (that also takes another 90% of the time) made this a fun experience. The number of mints was pretty much chosen to respect the original Arecibo message (23 times 73) while considering the algorithm’s strength. I was really confident that around 500 was the correct size for this algorithm, and pushing it too far would have been a mistake. It happens that 23 times 23 is 529. Call it fate; call it another quirk of the Infinite Improbability Drive. 529 mints it is.
At this point, everything was ready. I had the algorithm that worked at both scales: the individual mint, of course, creating those wonderful logical structures (sentences? words? concepts? data?) in the style I’m starting to be known for (MOAR CIRCLES, basically), and at the meta-scale: the map. A huge 23x23 puzzle that would represent the message brought by the Messengers.
Making this a riddle was obvious. So I started to hint at the idea that the piece would include a riddle, but I had a pretty good scare in the Art Blocks discord before I could do that.
Then the usual process of pushing the code to mainnet, getting ready to unpause, and my DMs were exploding with crazy ideas. Maybe next time, I’ll make the best of the ideas I received, but this was extremely fun. Some people got some parts right from the beginning; some had the best ideas to the point that I wished I had thought of it first.
But the crown was when someone sent me a map of the whole thing. Before release.
They had reverse-engineered the code found out the logic about the whole map, and generated fake mints to populate the map.
I was completely panicking at this point because their map was wrong. Although it was maybe the day before release, so I had everything pretty much committed on mainnet, any change I had to make would be costly and probably postpone the release.
Where did I make a mistake then? I did a couple more test runs on my side to make sure it was working correctly. It did.
I then had to look at what they sent me, obviously without sharing my doubts, and then it made sense. They did reverse engineer the code, but they had made a mistake: their map had the X and Y coordinates flipped!
I could then unpause the project to extremely overhyped levels, selling out in less than three minutes. Thanks to everybody that joined there.
Then it started. At least a couple of people had “solved” the riddle, as they knew what they had to do. The person who reverse-engineered the code was very close, and another person sent me the top-left quarter of the map.
Wait. Are they doing the puzzle manually?!?!
They were. And they were a team of four, working tirelessly for a few hours, copy-pasting 529 images into a huge document, basically doing a 529 pieces puzzle over the internet.
The other person was having dinner.
But they did attempt to figure out the bug in their solution. I might have hinted at both sides that they had excellent competition.
Then I received the map an hour later from the ‘manual puzzle team.’ And it had one tile overlapping another and one tile that got copy-pasted twice. Nope. Not going to make it.
And then it came. The manual collage of the 529 mints in all its imperfections.
The result of a few hours of crazy work by a team of four. Congrats to Dbochman, Keight, Nullflicker and GeorgeP! Also, congrats to PhABC for getting so close!
The winning team won a custom 1/1/4 that I’ll have to work on, but I’m super happy the riddle was a success and came to a very close call on the finish line.
Combining a Void, a Messengers, and an Obicera gives you a fantastic story to tell.
The story of how the Arecibo message reached an alien civilization, how they went on a trip to bring us back their answer, and how we deciphered it.
So here you have it. A story that started with creating the universe and the stars ended up with a remotely solved puzzle on Earth by a team of four. What lies at the center of the map? I would not know. We’ll have to go there and explore.
This article is a guest post by the prolific Alexis André and the incredible story of their Playground trilogy—Void, Messengers, and Obicera.
Let me give you some insights into the creative process of my first Art Blocks Playground trilogy.
Void
Void was very much a response to a personal revelation when it comes to thinking about each piece in terms of a broader collection instead of a set of independent mints. When I was doing 720 Minutes, I didn’t think collectors would want to get more than one.
I was proven very wrong.
Sometimes, rabid collecting happens on Art Blocks across projects, creating collections that share some common direction. You all know what I am talking about when I say ‘the monochrome collection.’ That really changed my perspective on the way this community experiences art.
Void started as an attempt to create a cohesive collection across all the individual mints, where you could line up two or three mints and find a story there. From the beginning, the theme for Void was to create planets and stars. A burst of matter against the emptiness of space. The technique was also chosen from the beginning—the project’s code name is ‘glowcircles’ on my computer.
Void was released as my first playground project, at a less hyped time when it took a whole week to mint all 500. This is, to this day, one of the best weeks I’ve had on the platform. The slow drip of the minter allowed everybody to explore each individual mint at a leisurely pace, and the reactions to the infamous “Time for Blood” binary star is something I will never forget.
The project id for Void is, of course, 42. If you don’t understand, you’ll need to do some homework before understanding the whole series because it only gets deeper, and we, of course, are using an Infinite Improbability Drive to get there.
Messengers
Void set the stage for the whole story. I had some stars, some planets, and the emptiness in between. Then, I started to work on my next piece, codename ‘scales.’ At this point, I was not planning to do a trilogy or connect the projects in any way.
I started the ‘scales’ project using some force-repulsion dynamics to generate the streaks you can see in Messengers. Reverse gravity, if you like. I did a lot of back and forth and had many passionate discussions with fellow artists about the nature of the piece, yet even late in the creative process, I was having trouble naming them. I remember calling them ‘Spirits,’ ‘Ghosts,’ or even ‘Dreams,’ but nothing really clicked.
At this point, the Messengers’ inner shape was based on a line slightly across the canvas, giving them this very peculiar form where sometimes there might be a head hidden somewhere. Then, I tried to start from a circle instead.
Everything. Made. Sense.
All the pieces started to fall in line. The aliens in ‘Arrival’ (you might have guessed by now I am extremely fond of sci-fi) used circles as their base structure for language. Wait. I have some stars and planets. I have those ethereal structures that share the same palettes with the stars and look organic. Now, what would be the name of ‘Arrival’ in Japanese?
メッセージ
Literally, ‘Message.’ That’s it then. Messengers it is. The idea formed there. Void would be the source of those lifeforms, those Messengers. They’re bringing us a message. The description reads:
“Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don’t talk to us. Yet.”
At this point, I had the story outline figured out. Void is the stars and planets. Messengers, well, are the aliens bringing us a message. What could it be? It meant a trilogy, and I needed a few more ideas to take everything to the next level.
Obicera
Let’s get back to this idea of set-making that really started the whole thing. It seems that collectors like the idea of triptychs, where you have three pieces aligned in a delightful manner. Chatting with Aaron Penne about future ideas (we bounced ideas against each other—the amount of respect between us makes it a no-brainer), it turned out we were both thinking along the same lines: we had the word triptych on the ‘things to look into’ list.
That’s how I started to work on the message. I wanted to create pieces with a strong structure to symbolize some unknown language and have a way to link two or three pieces together to form a triptych.
The idea was kind of interesting, but I was not sure if that particular way of connecting pieces would work across completely different mints or if they all would have the same overall structure. Not something that I wanted. Then, I had this crazy idea.
Then I started to think about the theme of the message. Contact/Arrival are movies that talked about aliens communicating with us. But wait, have we tried that? We have! The plot of Contact was very spot on. Contact begins at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, famous for hosting the SETI program until its tragic collapse not so long ago. And you know what also originated from Arecibo?
The Arecibo Message
Everything fits perfectly. We have sent a message meant to tell alien civilizations that we exist and have some knowledge of the universe. What would an alien civilization send back?
Obicera
Obviously, “Arecibo” backward. Now, what would be their message? Something that links across the whole mints. A…map. That’s it! The message is a map. A star map to the center of…I don’t know? Their homeworld? Their arch-nemesis planet? The answer to life, the universe, and everything?
At this point, I had awesome individual mints for Obicera, and the linked component was somehow the icing on the cake. I shared many test mints, but I don’t think anyone ever asked what those lines were for.
Then the remaining 10% of the piece (that also takes another 90% of the time) made this a fun experience. The number of mints was pretty much chosen to respect the original Arecibo message (23 times 73) while considering the algorithm’s strength. I was really confident that around 500 was the correct size for this algorithm, and pushing it too far would have been a mistake. It happens that 23 times 23 is 529. Call it fate; call it another quirk of the Infinite Improbability Drive. 529 mints it is.
At this point, everything was ready. I had the algorithm that worked at both scales: the individual mint, of course, creating those wonderful logical structures (sentences? words? concepts? data?) in the style I’m starting to be known for (MOAR CIRCLES, basically), and at the meta-scale: the map. A huge 23x23 puzzle that would represent the message brought by the Messengers.
Making this a riddle was obvious. So I started to hint at the idea that the piece would include a riddle, but I had a pretty good scare in the Art Blocks discord before I could do that.
Then the usual process of pushing the code to mainnet, getting ready to unpause, and my DMs were exploding with crazy ideas. Maybe next time, I’ll make the best of the ideas I received, but this was extremely fun. Some people got some parts right from the beginning; some had the best ideas to the point that I wished I had thought of it first.
But the crown was when someone sent me a map of the whole thing. Before release.
They had reverse-engineered the code found out the logic about the whole map, and generated fake mints to populate the map.
I was completely panicking at this point because their map was wrong. Although it was maybe the day before release, so I had everything pretty much committed on mainnet, any change I had to make would be costly and probably postpone the release.
Where did I make a mistake then? I did a couple more test runs on my side to make sure it was working correctly. It did.
I then had to look at what they sent me, obviously without sharing my doubts, and then it made sense. They did reverse engineer the code, but they had made a mistake: their map had the X and Y coordinates flipped!
I could then unpause the project to extremely overhyped levels, selling out in less than three minutes. Thanks to everybody that joined there.
Then it started. At least a couple of people had “solved” the riddle, as they knew what they had to do. The person who reverse-engineered the code was very close, and another person sent me the top-left quarter of the map.
Wait. Are they doing the puzzle manually?!?!
They were. And they were a team of four, working tirelessly for a few hours, copy-pasting 529 images into a huge document, basically doing a 529 pieces puzzle over the internet.
The other person was having dinner.
But they did attempt to figure out the bug in their solution. I might have hinted at both sides that they had excellent competition.
Then I received the map an hour later from the ‘manual puzzle team.’ And it had one tile overlapping another and one tile that got copy-pasted twice. Nope. Not going to make it.
And then it came. The manual collage of the 529 mints in all its imperfections.
The result of a few hours of crazy work by a team of four. Congrats to Dbochman, Keight, Nullflicker and GeorgeP! Also, congrats to PhABC for getting so close!
The winning team won a custom 1/1/4 that I’ll have to work on, but I’m super happy the riddle was a success and came to a very close call on the finish line.
Combining a Void, a Messengers, and an Obicera gives you a fantastic story to tell.
The story of how the Arecibo message reached an alien civilization, how they went on a trip to bring us back their answer, and how we deciphered it.
So here you have it. A story that started with creating the universe and the stars ended up with a remotely solved puzzle on Earth by a team of four. What lies at the center of the map? I would not know. We’ll have to go there and explore.
This article is a guest post by the prolific Alexis André and the incredible story of their Playground trilogy—Void, Messengers, and Obicera.
Let me give you some insights into the creative process of my first Art Blocks Playground trilogy.
Void
Void was very much a response to a personal revelation when it comes to thinking about each piece in terms of a broader collection instead of a set of independent mints. When I was doing 720 Minutes, I didn’t think collectors would want to get more than one.
I was proven very wrong.
Sometimes, rabid collecting happens on Art Blocks across projects, creating collections that share some common direction. You all know what I am talking about when I say ‘the monochrome collection.’ That really changed my perspective on the way this community experiences art.
Void started as an attempt to create a cohesive collection across all the individual mints, where you could line up two or three mints and find a story there. From the beginning, the theme for Void was to create planets and stars. A burst of matter against the emptiness of space. The technique was also chosen from the beginning—the project’s code name is ‘glowcircles’ on my computer.
Void was released as my first playground project, at a less hyped time when it took a whole week to mint all 500. This is, to this day, one of the best weeks I’ve had on the platform. The slow drip of the minter allowed everybody to explore each individual mint at a leisurely pace, and the reactions to the infamous “Time for Blood” binary star is something I will never forget.
The project id for Void is, of course, 42. If you don’t understand, you’ll need to do some homework before understanding the whole series because it only gets deeper, and we, of course, are using an Infinite Improbability Drive to get there.
Messengers
Void set the stage for the whole story. I had some stars, some planets, and the emptiness in between. Then, I started to work on my next piece, codename ‘scales.’ At this point, I was not planning to do a trilogy or connect the projects in any way.
I started the ‘scales’ project using some force-repulsion dynamics to generate the streaks you can see in Messengers. Reverse gravity, if you like. I did a lot of back and forth and had many passionate discussions with fellow artists about the nature of the piece, yet even late in the creative process, I was having trouble naming them. I remember calling them ‘Spirits,’ ‘Ghosts,’ or even ‘Dreams,’ but nothing really clicked.
At this point, the Messengers’ inner shape was based on a line slightly across the canvas, giving them this very peculiar form where sometimes there might be a head hidden somewhere. Then, I tried to start from a circle instead.
Everything. Made. Sense.
All the pieces started to fall in line. The aliens in ‘Arrival’ (you might have guessed by now I am extremely fond of sci-fi) used circles as their base structure for language. Wait. I have some stars and planets. I have those ethereal structures that share the same palettes with the stars and look organic. Now, what would be the name of ‘Arrival’ in Japanese?
メッセージ
Literally, ‘Message.’ That’s it then. Messengers it is. The idea formed there. Void would be the source of those lifeforms, those Messengers. They’re bringing us a message. The description reads:
“Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don’t talk to us. Yet.”
At this point, I had the story outline figured out. Void is the stars and planets. Messengers, well, are the aliens bringing us a message. What could it be? It meant a trilogy, and I needed a few more ideas to take everything to the next level.
Obicera
Let’s get back to this idea of set-making that really started the whole thing. It seems that collectors like the idea of triptychs, where you have three pieces aligned in a delightful manner. Chatting with Aaron Penne about future ideas (we bounced ideas against each other—the amount of respect between us makes it a no-brainer), it turned out we were both thinking along the same lines: we had the word triptych on the ‘things to look into’ list.
That’s how I started to work on the message. I wanted to create pieces with a strong structure to symbolize some unknown language and have a way to link two or three pieces together to form a triptych.
The idea was kind of interesting, but I was not sure if that particular way of connecting pieces would work across completely different mints or if they all would have the same overall structure. Not something that I wanted. Then, I had this crazy idea.
Then I started to think about the theme of the message. Contact/Arrival are movies that talked about aliens communicating with us. But wait, have we tried that? We have! The plot of Contact was very spot on. Contact begins at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, famous for hosting the SETI program until its tragic collapse not so long ago. And you know what also originated from Arecibo?
The Arecibo Message
Everything fits perfectly. We have sent a message meant to tell alien civilizations that we exist and have some knowledge of the universe. What would an alien civilization send back?
Obicera
Obviously, “Arecibo” backward. Now, what would be their message? Something that links across the whole mints. A…map. That’s it! The message is a map. A star map to the center of…I don’t know? Their homeworld? Their arch-nemesis planet? The answer to life, the universe, and everything?
At this point, I had awesome individual mints for Obicera, and the linked component was somehow the icing on the cake. I shared many test mints, but I don’t think anyone ever asked what those lines were for.
Then the remaining 10% of the piece (that also takes another 90% of the time) made this a fun experience. The number of mints was pretty much chosen to respect the original Arecibo message (23 times 73) while considering the algorithm’s strength. I was really confident that around 500 was the correct size for this algorithm, and pushing it too far would have been a mistake. It happens that 23 times 23 is 529. Call it fate; call it another quirk of the Infinite Improbability Drive. 529 mints it is.
At this point, everything was ready. I had the algorithm that worked at both scales: the individual mint, of course, creating those wonderful logical structures (sentences? words? concepts? data?) in the style I’m starting to be known for (MOAR CIRCLES, basically), and at the meta-scale: the map. A huge 23x23 puzzle that would represent the message brought by the Messengers.
Making this a riddle was obvious. So I started to hint at the idea that the piece would include a riddle, but I had a pretty good scare in the Art Blocks discord before I could do that.
Then the usual process of pushing the code to mainnet, getting ready to unpause, and my DMs were exploding with crazy ideas. Maybe next time, I’ll make the best of the ideas I received, but this was extremely fun. Some people got some parts right from the beginning; some had the best ideas to the point that I wished I had thought of it first.
But the crown was when someone sent me a map of the whole thing. Before release.
They had reverse-engineered the code found out the logic about the whole map, and generated fake mints to populate the map.
I was completely panicking at this point because their map was wrong. Although it was maybe the day before release, so I had everything pretty much committed on mainnet, any change I had to make would be costly and probably postpone the release.
Where did I make a mistake then? I did a couple more test runs on my side to make sure it was working correctly. It did.
I then had to look at what they sent me, obviously without sharing my doubts, and then it made sense. They did reverse engineer the code, but they had made a mistake: their map had the X and Y coordinates flipped!
I could then unpause the project to extremely overhyped levels, selling out in less than three minutes. Thanks to everybody that joined there.
Then it started. At least a couple of people had “solved” the riddle, as they knew what they had to do. The person who reverse-engineered the code was very close, and another person sent me the top-left quarter of the map.
Wait. Are they doing the puzzle manually?!?!
They were. And they were a team of four, working tirelessly for a few hours, copy-pasting 529 images into a huge document, basically doing a 529 pieces puzzle over the internet.
The other person was having dinner.
But they did attempt to figure out the bug in their solution. I might have hinted at both sides that they had excellent competition.
Then I received the map an hour later from the ‘manual puzzle team.’ And it had one tile overlapping another and one tile that got copy-pasted twice. Nope. Not going to make it.
And then it came. The manual collage of the 529 mints in all its imperfections.
The result of a few hours of crazy work by a team of four. Congrats to Dbochman, Keight, Nullflicker and GeorgeP! Also, congrats to PhABC for getting so close!
The winning team won a custom 1/1/4 that I’ll have to work on, but I’m super happy the riddle was a success and came to a very close call on the finish line.
Combining a Void, a Messengers, and an Obicera gives you a fantastic story to tell.
The story of how the Arecibo message reached an alien civilization, how they went on a trip to bring us back their answer, and how we deciphered it.
So here you have it. A story that started with creating the universe and the stars ended up with a remotely solved puzzle on Earth by a team of four. What lies at the center of the map? I would not know. We’ll have to go there and explore.
This article is a guest post by the prolific Alexis André and the incredible story of their Playground trilogy—Void, Messengers, and Obicera.
Let me give you some insights into the creative process of my first Art Blocks Playground trilogy.
Void
Void was very much a response to a personal revelation when it comes to thinking about each piece in terms of a broader collection instead of a set of independent mints. When I was doing 720 Minutes, I didn’t think collectors would want to get more than one.
I was proven very wrong.
Sometimes, rabid collecting happens on Art Blocks across projects, creating collections that share some common direction. You all know what I am talking about when I say ‘the monochrome collection.’ That really changed my perspective on the way this community experiences art.
Void started as an attempt to create a cohesive collection across all the individual mints, where you could line up two or three mints and find a story there. From the beginning, the theme for Void was to create planets and stars. A burst of matter against the emptiness of space. The technique was also chosen from the beginning—the project’s code name is ‘glowcircles’ on my computer.
Void was released as my first playground project, at a less hyped time when it took a whole week to mint all 500. This is, to this day, one of the best weeks I’ve had on the platform. The slow drip of the minter allowed everybody to explore each individual mint at a leisurely pace, and the reactions to the infamous “Time for Blood” binary star is something I will never forget.
The project id for Void is, of course, 42. If you don’t understand, you’ll need to do some homework before understanding the whole series because it only gets deeper, and we, of course, are using an Infinite Improbability Drive to get there.
Messengers
Void set the stage for the whole story. I had some stars, some planets, and the emptiness in between. Then, I started to work on my next piece, codename ‘scales.’ At this point, I was not planning to do a trilogy or connect the projects in any way.
I started the ‘scales’ project using some force-repulsion dynamics to generate the streaks you can see in Messengers. Reverse gravity, if you like. I did a lot of back and forth and had many passionate discussions with fellow artists about the nature of the piece, yet even late in the creative process, I was having trouble naming them. I remember calling them ‘Spirits,’ ‘Ghosts,’ or even ‘Dreams,’ but nothing really clicked.
At this point, the Messengers’ inner shape was based on a line slightly across the canvas, giving them this very peculiar form where sometimes there might be a head hidden somewhere. Then, I tried to start from a circle instead.
Everything. Made. Sense.
All the pieces started to fall in line. The aliens in ‘Arrival’ (you might have guessed by now I am extremely fond of sci-fi) used circles as their base structure for language. Wait. I have some stars and planets. I have those ethereal structures that share the same palettes with the stars and look organic. Now, what would be the name of ‘Arrival’ in Japanese?
メッセージ
Literally, ‘Message.’ That’s it then. Messengers it is. The idea formed there. Void would be the source of those lifeforms, those Messengers. They’re bringing us a message. The description reads:
“Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don’t talk to us. Yet.”
At this point, I had the story outline figured out. Void is the stars and planets. Messengers, well, are the aliens bringing us a message. What could it be? It meant a trilogy, and I needed a few more ideas to take everything to the next level.
Obicera
Let’s get back to this idea of set-making that really started the whole thing. It seems that collectors like the idea of triptychs, where you have three pieces aligned in a delightful manner. Chatting with Aaron Penne about future ideas (we bounced ideas against each other—the amount of respect between us makes it a no-brainer), it turned out we were both thinking along the same lines: we had the word triptych on the ‘things to look into’ list.
That’s how I started to work on the message. I wanted to create pieces with a strong structure to symbolize some unknown language and have a way to link two or three pieces together to form a triptych.
The idea was kind of interesting, but I was not sure if that particular way of connecting pieces would work across completely different mints or if they all would have the same overall structure. Not something that I wanted. Then, I had this crazy idea.
Then I started to think about the theme of the message. Contact/Arrival are movies that talked about aliens communicating with us. But wait, have we tried that? We have! The plot of Contact was very spot on. Contact begins at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, famous for hosting the SETI program until its tragic collapse not so long ago. And you know what also originated from Arecibo?
The Arecibo Message
Everything fits perfectly. We have sent a message meant to tell alien civilizations that we exist and have some knowledge of the universe. What would an alien civilization send back?
Obicera
Obviously, “Arecibo” backward. Now, what would be their message? Something that links across the whole mints. A…map. That’s it! The message is a map. A star map to the center of…I don’t know? Their homeworld? Their arch-nemesis planet? The answer to life, the universe, and everything?
At this point, I had awesome individual mints for Obicera, and the linked component was somehow the icing on the cake. I shared many test mints, but I don’t think anyone ever asked what those lines were for.
Then the remaining 10% of the piece (that also takes another 90% of the time) made this a fun experience. The number of mints was pretty much chosen to respect the original Arecibo message (23 times 73) while considering the algorithm’s strength. I was really confident that around 500 was the correct size for this algorithm, and pushing it too far would have been a mistake. It happens that 23 times 23 is 529. Call it fate; call it another quirk of the Infinite Improbability Drive. 529 mints it is.
At this point, everything was ready. I had the algorithm that worked at both scales: the individual mint, of course, creating those wonderful logical structures (sentences? words? concepts? data?) in the style I’m starting to be known for (MOAR CIRCLES, basically), and at the meta-scale: the map. A huge 23x23 puzzle that would represent the message brought by the Messengers.
Making this a riddle was obvious. So I started to hint at the idea that the piece would include a riddle, but I had a pretty good scare in the Art Blocks discord before I could do that.
Then the usual process of pushing the code to mainnet, getting ready to unpause, and my DMs were exploding with crazy ideas. Maybe next time, I’ll make the best of the ideas I received, but this was extremely fun. Some people got some parts right from the beginning; some had the best ideas to the point that I wished I had thought of it first.
But the crown was when someone sent me a map of the whole thing. Before release.
They had reverse-engineered the code found out the logic about the whole map, and generated fake mints to populate the map.
I was completely panicking at this point because their map was wrong. Although it was maybe the day before release, so I had everything pretty much committed on mainnet, any change I had to make would be costly and probably postpone the release.
Where did I make a mistake then? I did a couple more test runs on my side to make sure it was working correctly. It did.
I then had to look at what they sent me, obviously without sharing my doubts, and then it made sense. They did reverse engineer the code, but they had made a mistake: their map had the X and Y coordinates flipped!
I could then unpause the project to extremely overhyped levels, selling out in less than three minutes. Thanks to everybody that joined there.
Then it started. At least a couple of people had “solved” the riddle, as they knew what they had to do. The person who reverse-engineered the code was very close, and another person sent me the top-left quarter of the map.
Wait. Are they doing the puzzle manually?!?!
They were. And they were a team of four, working tirelessly for a few hours, copy-pasting 529 images into a huge document, basically doing a 529 pieces puzzle over the internet.
The other person was having dinner.
But they did attempt to figure out the bug in their solution. I might have hinted at both sides that they had excellent competition.
Then I received the map an hour later from the ‘manual puzzle team.’ And it had one tile overlapping another and one tile that got copy-pasted twice. Nope. Not going to make it.
And then it came. The manual collage of the 529 mints in all its imperfections.
The result of a few hours of crazy work by a team of four. Congrats to Dbochman, Keight, Nullflicker and GeorgeP! Also, congrats to PhABC for getting so close!
The winning team won a custom 1/1/4 that I’ll have to work on, but I’m super happy the riddle was a success and came to a very close call on the finish line.
Combining a Void, a Messengers, and an Obicera gives you a fantastic story to tell.
The story of how the Arecibo message reached an alien civilization, how they went on a trip to bring us back their answer, and how we deciphered it.
So here you have it. A story that started with creating the universe and the stars ended up with a remotely solved puzzle on Earth by a team of four. What lies at the center of the map? I would not know. We’ll have to go there and explore.
This article is a guest post by the prolific Alexis André and the incredible story of their Playground trilogy—Void, Messengers, and Obicera.
Let me give you some insights into the creative process of my first Art Blocks Playground trilogy.
Void
Void was very much a response to a personal revelation when it comes to thinking about each piece in terms of a broader collection instead of a set of independent mints. When I was doing 720 Minutes, I didn’t think collectors would want to get more than one.
I was proven very wrong.
Sometimes, rabid collecting happens on Art Blocks across projects, creating collections that share some common direction. You all know what I am talking about when I say ‘the monochrome collection.’ That really changed my perspective on the way this community experiences art.
Void started as an attempt to create a cohesive collection across all the individual mints, where you could line up two or three mints and find a story there. From the beginning, the theme for Void was to create planets and stars. A burst of matter against the emptiness of space. The technique was also chosen from the beginning—the project’s code name is ‘glowcircles’ on my computer.
Void was released as my first playground project, at a less hyped time when it took a whole week to mint all 500. This is, to this day, one of the best weeks I’ve had on the platform. The slow drip of the minter allowed everybody to explore each individual mint at a leisurely pace, and the reactions to the infamous “Time for Blood” binary star is something I will never forget.
The project id for Void is, of course, 42. If you don’t understand, you’ll need to do some homework before understanding the whole series because it only gets deeper, and we, of course, are using an Infinite Improbability Drive to get there.
Messengers
Void set the stage for the whole story. I had some stars, some planets, and the emptiness in between. Then, I started to work on my next piece, codename ‘scales.’ At this point, I was not planning to do a trilogy or connect the projects in any way.
I started the ‘scales’ project using some force-repulsion dynamics to generate the streaks you can see in Messengers. Reverse gravity, if you like. I did a lot of back and forth and had many passionate discussions with fellow artists about the nature of the piece, yet even late in the creative process, I was having trouble naming them. I remember calling them ‘Spirits,’ ‘Ghosts,’ or even ‘Dreams,’ but nothing really clicked.
At this point, the Messengers’ inner shape was based on a line slightly across the canvas, giving them this very peculiar form where sometimes there might be a head hidden somewhere. Then, I tried to start from a circle instead.
Everything. Made. Sense.
All the pieces started to fall in line. The aliens in ‘Arrival’ (you might have guessed by now I am extremely fond of sci-fi) used circles as their base structure for language. Wait. I have some stars and planets. I have those ethereal structures that share the same palettes with the stars and look organic. Now, what would be the name of ‘Arrival’ in Japanese?
メッセージ
Literally, ‘Message.’ That’s it then. Messengers it is. The idea formed there. Void would be the source of those lifeforms, those Messengers. They’re bringing us a message. The description reads:
“Those structures suddenly appeared, yet they don’t talk to us. Yet.”
At this point, I had the story outline figured out. Void is the stars and planets. Messengers, well, are the aliens bringing us a message. What could it be? It meant a trilogy, and I needed a few more ideas to take everything to the next level.
Obicera
Let’s get back to this idea of set-making that really started the whole thing. It seems that collectors like the idea of triptychs, where you have three pieces aligned in a delightful manner. Chatting with Aaron Penne about future ideas (we bounced ideas against each other—the amount of respect between us makes it a no-brainer), it turned out we were both thinking along the same lines: we had the word triptych on the ‘things to look into’ list.
That’s how I started to work on the message. I wanted to create pieces with a strong structure to symbolize some unknown language and have a way to link two or three pieces together to form a triptych.
The idea was kind of interesting, but I was not sure if that particular way of connecting pieces would work across completely different mints or if they all would have the same overall structure. Not something that I wanted. Then, I had this crazy idea.
Then I started to think about the theme of the message. Contact/Arrival are movies that talked about aliens communicating with us. But wait, have we tried that? We have! The plot of Contact was very spot on. Contact begins at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, famous for hosting the SETI program until its tragic collapse not so long ago. And you know what also originated from Arecibo?
The Arecibo Message
Everything fits perfectly. We have sent a message meant to tell alien civilizations that we exist and have some knowledge of the universe. What would an alien civilization send back?
Obicera
Obviously, “Arecibo” backward. Now, what would be their message? Something that links across the whole mints. A…map. That’s it! The message is a map. A star map to the center of…I don’t know? Their homeworld? Their arch-nemesis planet? The answer to life, the universe, and everything?
At this point, I had awesome individual mints for Obicera, and the linked component was somehow the icing on the cake. I shared many test mints, but I don’t think anyone ever asked what those lines were for.
Then the remaining 10% of the piece (that also takes another 90% of the time) made this a fun experience. The number of mints was pretty much chosen to respect the original Arecibo message (23 times 73) while considering the algorithm’s strength. I was really confident that around 500 was the correct size for this algorithm, and pushing it too far would have been a mistake. It happens that 23 times 23 is 529. Call it fate; call it another quirk of the Infinite Improbability Drive. 529 mints it is.
At this point, everything was ready. I had the algorithm that worked at both scales: the individual mint, of course, creating those wonderful logical structures (sentences? words? concepts? data?) in the style I’m starting to be known for (MOAR CIRCLES, basically), and at the meta-scale: the map. A huge 23x23 puzzle that would represent the message brought by the Messengers.
Making this a riddle was obvious. So I started to hint at the idea that the piece would include a riddle, but I had a pretty good scare in the Art Blocks discord before I could do that.
Then the usual process of pushing the code to mainnet, getting ready to unpause, and my DMs were exploding with crazy ideas. Maybe next time, I’ll make the best of the ideas I received, but this was extremely fun. Some people got some parts right from the beginning; some had the best ideas to the point that I wished I had thought of it first.
But the crown was when someone sent me a map of the whole thing. Before release.
They had reverse-engineered the code found out the logic about the whole map, and generated fake mints to populate the map.
I was completely panicking at this point because their map was wrong. Although it was maybe the day before release, so I had everything pretty much committed on mainnet, any change I had to make would be costly and probably postpone the release.
Where did I make a mistake then? I did a couple more test runs on my side to make sure it was working correctly. It did.
I then had to look at what they sent me, obviously without sharing my doubts, and then it made sense. They did reverse engineer the code, but they had made a mistake: their map had the X and Y coordinates flipped!
I could then unpause the project to extremely overhyped levels, selling out in less than three minutes. Thanks to everybody that joined there.
Then it started. At least a couple of people had “solved” the riddle, as they knew what they had to do. The person who reverse-engineered the code was very close, and another person sent me the top-left quarter of the map.
Wait. Are they doing the puzzle manually?!?!
They were. And they were a team of four, working tirelessly for a few hours, copy-pasting 529 images into a huge document, basically doing a 529 pieces puzzle over the internet.
The other person was having dinner.
But they did attempt to figure out the bug in their solution. I might have hinted at both sides that they had excellent competition.
Then I received the map an hour later from the ‘manual puzzle team.’ And it had one tile overlapping another and one tile that got copy-pasted twice. Nope. Not going to make it.
And then it came. The manual collage of the 529 mints in all its imperfections.
The result of a few hours of crazy work by a team of four. Congrats to Dbochman, Keight, Nullflicker and GeorgeP! Also, congrats to PhABC for getting so close!
The winning team won a custom 1/1/4 that I’ll have to work on, but I’m super happy the riddle was a success and came to a very close call on the finish line.
Combining a Void, a Messengers, and an Obicera gives you a fantastic story to tell.
The story of how the Arecibo message reached an alien civilization, how they went on a trip to bring us back their answer, and how we deciphered it.
So here you have it. A story that started with creating the universe and the stars ended up with a remotely solved puzzle on Earth by a team of four. What lies at the center of the map? I would not know. We’ll have to go there and explore.
