Often referred to as the “Cave Paintings of On-Chain Art”, Autoglyphs are the first art project that was both generated and stored entirely on-chain. By directly involving the collector in the execution of the artist’s algorithm, Autoglyphs formalized the idea that the art is the algorithm and launched a new genre of generative blockchain art.
Following the success of CryptoPunks as artworks that could be owned and traded via the blockchain, we asked ourselves if it would be possible for an artwork to not just be registered and traded on-chain, but actually be created there as well.
Autoglyphs, launched in 2019, was the answer– a collection that exists only on the blockchain, its pieces created in real-time during minting by collectors. While CryptoPunks recorded their algorithmically generated images on the Ethereum blockchain, the Autoglyphs generator algorithm was embedded on-chain. Each time the algorithm ran, the Ethereum network itself ran the code in the smart contract to create each Glyph.
In Autoglyphs, the art is inside the contract itself. This can be seen by examining any glyph creation transaction on the blockchain. The event data contains the full output of the generator (rendered as text-based “ASCII art”), and hence the art piece itself.1
With this approach, the generator code itself became the primary artwork, formalizing the experience of creating the system rather than its outputs and removing traditional curatorial elements from the artistic process. Relinquishing this control, we could not choose outputs nor intervene in the creative process of the art generation once we had deployed the smart contract. In this way, the act of “minting” becomes a live performance for which we can rehearse, but cannot predict nor repeat. Here, a model of infinite possibilities is constrained to the finite, a permanently limited set that has become the model adopted by Art Blocks and other platforms that followed.
The aesthetics were strongly shaped by necessity. Because the artwork had to live within a single Ethereum transaction, the algorithm had to be stripped to its bare essentials - capable of producing endlessly varied forms while using the tiny amount of computation that is afforded to a single blockchain transaction. The result is a series of interference-like ASCII code patterns that are simple at first glance but rich in internal variation. Although the algorithm could, in theory, generate endlessly, it was capped at 512. This number was chosen to be large enough to show the system’s full aesthetic range, but small enough for each output to feel distinct and special.
Within 4 hours of launch, all 512 Autoglyphs had been created2. The artwork, along with its moment and mechanism of creation, are inscribed in code and preserved indefinitely in the blockchain.3
Today, Autoglyphs are part of major museum collections, including the Centre Pompidou and the Whitney Museum. They are studied as much for their conceptual rigor as for their visual language - proof that the algorithm could be the artwork, and that the blockchain itself could be an artistic medium.