Timezone4

Asked by Plaza Protocol to develop a fourth iteration, we focused on an on-chain artwork, reducing the dependence on sculptural elements, interfaces and self hosted infrastructure. The ability to generate image files - i.e. SVGs and Bitmaps - in the smart contract itself is crucial to us. Since the advent of the NFT standard, artists are now experimenting with Solidity (the programming language of EVM) as a creative coding language. The digital materiality of the medium is really being considered; smart contracts - being turing machines - can not only generate and execute other formal languages but also generate any file formats natively. With Timezone #4 we wanted to generate artwork which is always changing its metadata and animation without relying on an external data source: a self-contained, immanent visualisation of time in a global network of computation only bound to its own temporal infrastructure. Temporal secessionism in its purest form.

Looking at what the EVM can intrinsically recognize leads to Opcode 0x42 and 0x43 - the current timestamp of the last block and the current block number. With saving the deployment block and timestamp of every NFT it becomes pretty easy to calculate the average time per block. In this sense the contract always predicts what the blocktime is to the scale of a second. Whilst this will sometimes deviate somewhat from the actual blocktime, it will still give an understanding of the changing temporality of chain rythmes. In other words, the contract calculates the average blocktime from each token’s time of minting, and translates this into a svg animation, thus giving the user of Timezone#4 an intuitive understanding of a pulse – a morphing motion. Every single NFT has an individual minting block. Because of this, every pulse is different in the beginning but through accumulation the blocks merge together in an endless process, one that will literally take forever. Every request to view the metadata might also change the animation (in practice, especially right after the token is minted).

Read more at nascent.energy