Creating, Destroying, and Restoring On-Chain Artwork

2024-10-16 14:45:32 Primitive Reading

From Etherscan Blog by Takens Theorem

This post is about an amazing NFT project on Ethereum called “Rothko on Pennies” and the events surrounding it — including my own participation. This project and its provocations illustrate that the artistic character of a project goes well beyond just the instant glimpse of its visual form. On public blockchain, where code is (or, might be) “law,” artwork can solicit interventions, extensions, hacking. A work’s meaning evolves sometimes in surprising ways even to the original creator. And on blockchain that meaning takes technically curious forms, even using tools typically reserved for more malicious intents but deployed for better purposes: hacking art, hacking as art.

“Rothko on Pennies”

The artist Yigit Duman recently created “Rothko on Pennies” (RoP). It is a clever, playful hack of a sort: RoP encodes a rendition of Mark Rothko’s “Composition (1959)” by storing a PNG on tiny balances across almost 1,000 contracts (981 to be precise).

Rothko on Pennies by Yigit Duman, original (unaltered) version

There’s something beautiful in Yigit’s exercise. It’s most certainly a kind of exploit itself. RoP uses a clever trick to get around the strict computational limits of Ethereum mainnet. For one, Yigit exploits the precision of balances to store data (each wei is 1/10¹⁸ ether). He also uses simple balance calls across these 1,000 contracts to reconstruct the image. The balances cost mere pennies, and deploying the contracts cost less than 0.1 ETH in total (about $250 at the time of writing). Yigit’s beautiful NFT project loops through an array of contract addresses, gets their balances, and assembles a base64-encoded payload that shows the Rothko on the token’s metadata.

Yigit Duman encoded data across tiny balances on about a thousand contracts. From Etherscan.

Yigit Duman’s announcement about RoP sparked a lot of attention. Many recognized striking cleverness of the approach: a beautiful rendering of influential abstract artwork stored entirely on-chain across the dust of a thousand contracts. RoP was auctioned for 1.256 ETH, won by Serc.

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