The Concept
Last updated
Last updated
SEEDS has been meticulously shaped to serve a wide range of functions for the artist, collectors, and all those who choose to engage with it, from now until the end of time.
From introspection and play, to collection and aesthetic appreciation, to interoperation and computation, SEEDS' inscriptions are elemental creations that embody an attempt to grasp and grapple with a transcendental future that is materializing before our eyes.
The word "eschaton" refers to the final event, often understood as the end of the world or the culmination of history. SEEDS is a direct confrontation of this notion. An artwork shot like a firework, or perhaps a signal flare, to mark the historical significance of this time.
How will we respond when our own historicity asserts itself?
What seeds will we plant? What garden will grow?
The end is only the beginning.
The times are changing. We are crossing a threshold beyond which much of the art, media, and content that we encounter will be generative in some way.
From images and interaction, to characters and worlds, the infinite possibility of the generative space is set to spill over the world, and generative art has presaged this coming shift for many decades.
SEEDS communes with the infinite field of generation while simultaneously keeping one foot in the increasingly precious realm of the finite.
Although each variation of a seed inscription's visual appearance is "generated" with a seed number, the source artwork is a very-not-generated layered composition in which every element was carefully laid with intention. Less computation, more sculpture.
In this way, SEEDS is not so much generative as it is composable.
As the artist puts it:
"I wanted to take a different approach to generative art in order to have a more tangible relationship with the work; rather than isolating generations within a computational space, I wanted to create a permutation space for a hand-crafted digital artwork that could be disassembled and reassembled at will." - dxxmsdxy
The artwork is a humble monument to humanity standing at the dawn of an infinite AI-generated future and saying; "Oh yea? I can do that too."
Meanwhile, at the level of the collection, unforeseen patterns and relationships emerge from the changing states of the seeds, and again, SEEDS drifts from the main through-line of generative art, toward emergence.
The onchain structures arising from changes within the collection give form to a living network organism spreading like mycelium through the soil of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Encoded in the world we perceive are patterns that have such primacy that their simplest features reveal deep insights into the very nature of reality and experience: numbers.
Numbers are the most primordial and powerful symbols we possess, from which all other symbols emerge.
"Number rules the universe" - Pythagoras
For example, the number "1" is not just an integer; it underpins key philosophical concepts like unity, identity, beginnings, linearity, and so much more, and is the atomic building block of mathematics, logic, physics, and engineering.
Understanding of the number "1" unlocks not just mental constructs that deepen our perceptions and intuition, but also new dimensions of control over matter and computation.
The same enlightening potential can be found in all numbers.
Numbers can embody geometries, symmetries, and relationships. They can encode concepts and identities, or mark points of interest within discrete spaces.
The SEEDS artwork offers a language for exploring and composing these elemental symbolic constructs, and can be interpreted with ever-deepening meaning, both onchain, and off.
Beyond the raw properties of number itself, SEEDS also provides a structured approach for interpreting and selecting seed numbers using various esoteric and divinatory traditions from around the world.
Each number has a natural resonance within Western and Eastern astrological traditions, Tarot, the I Ching, and more. Each number can be mapped to frequency and form.
These reflective windows into the world of numbers are presented but not insisted upon. Ultimately, a number is not more than how it is processed in its invocation.
While the SEEDS visual artwork is the superficial interpretation of a seed number, it's the built-in metadata viewer that uncovers a seed number's deeper attributes.
The insights into the character of numbers that are exposed by SEEDS' metadata viewer is what powers the project's most bold and thematically imperative purpose: to be a creative dashboard for programming digital souls.
The PFP established a cornerstone of online identity, gesturing toward persona but offering only edifice. SEEDS provides the other half of the equation; offering persona, and only gesturing toward edifice.
This idea is a continuation of the conversation initiated by the PFP, but carried forward into the age of agentic AI. It circles the ever-evocative, precautionary question of whether an AI possess attributes deserving of moral consideration.
While questions regarding more nebulous words like "sentience" or "consciousness" hang in the air beyond our grasp, there are more tangible questions that we can ask. Can a digital entity have an identity? Can it objectively change and grow?
The SEEDS are among the first such entities to be etched into our history of the future. Souls without bodies or worlds to roam. Souls outside of time yet to be truly born.
Artworks that use protocols as a medium are known as "protocol art"—a subset of network art.
In the case of SEEDS, the Bitcoin protocol presents the canvas, and the Ordinals protocol provides a creative toolkit to tap and play with Bitcoin's native features.
SEEDS' concept, design, and implementation are all in dialogue with the nature of the Bitcoin network, as both medium and message: the Bitcoin blockchain may be immutable, but even immutability cannot forestall change.
At a technical level, SEEDS itself also introduces a 'metaprotocol'—or design pattern—for handling onchain seed numbers. Holders record structured messages onchain that are recognized and interpreted by the artwork, changing the state of the inscription and the collection at large.
In a sense, the SEEDS artwork is a universal visualizer for seed numbers (and other onchain generative primitives) that will persist long into the future.
Digital artwork has walked a difficult road; the ephemerality of digital information has limited the form. Its transience has rendered digital artwork as cheap, disposable, and intangible in the minds of many.
With Bitcoin, the digital artist encounters a tantalizing proposition; a precious medium in which one can permanently instantiate digital artwork, giving it a definite form that is natively transferrable, referred to by some as "digital matter".
Suddenly, digital art gains qualities that make it more 'real'.
With continued contemplation, a deeper truth becomes apparent; the Bitcoin blockchain may confer an even more permanent existence than any physical artwork has ever enjoyed. To inscribe art onto the canvas of Bitcoin blockspace is to write directly into the pages of history, never to be lost or forgotten so long as our technological civilization persists.
In 100 years, SEEDS will still be here.
How will the garden have grown?
The SEEDS artwork draws our attention to a new composable primitive in the onchain toolkit: raw seed number inscriptions.
By creating these permanent artifacts designed to initialize on-and-off-chain generative systems using a structured syntax, the SEEDS collection aims to create a focal point for collectors, creators, and builders to explore the possible together.
In the end, a seed's visual appearance is only one representation of what it really is; a hyper-object, capable of programming yet unimagined systems, expanding into the future.
At the heart of the SEEDS artwork is an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics); an XML file format designed to be human readable, thanks to its use of the Document Object Model (DOM). For decades this design pattern, also employed by HTML, has allowed developers to intuitively grasp the composition and structure of the documents they work with.
Unlike the other standard image formats like JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, which are all raster graphics that reduce an image to flattened pixel data, SVGs are made of a highly compressed code that only takes form when it is embedded in the proper substrate—just as a seed flourishes in the soil.
SVG is more ephemeral than a JPEG, but more deterministic than the generative apparitions of tomorrow. They have small file sizes, are infinitely scalable, can be styled with CSS (like websites), and can include embedded JavaScript, allowing them to be dynamic and interactive.
As a result of this experience, their deepening familiarity with the SVG format gave rise to the idea for SEEDS, an artwork designed to take full advantage of the creative affordances of SVG inscriptions.
The combination of the HTML, SVG, CSS, and JavaScript makes a SEEDS inscription the perfect encapsulation of the now-closing era of the internet.
An age where the underlying structures and functions of the web were aspirationally human-readable; eccentric mazes of nested DOM elements, style inheritances, and JavaScript functions that we ventured into by hand.
Just as the art of stonemasonry has passed from our world with the artisans who honed their skills in an age that coveted their craft, so too will the art of the World Wide Web and the minutiae of its toil.
The SEEDS collection is the confluence of several streams of thought that the polymath artist, , has followed throughout their life—spanning art, product design, software development, and invention—and in particular, their work with crypto (2012-present) and AI (2018-present).
The fitted-ness of SVG to the medium of inscription is an insight gleaned by the artist in the process of creating one of the first and most iconic artworks in Ordinals——the 2nd largest Sub-100k ordinal collection, and standard bearer for the inherent value of Bitcoin blockspace. This work was followed shortly by the interactive pop-art experiment, .
