Unigraphs is a collection of 555 generative artworks inscribed on palindrome sats on BTC blockchain made by creative coder@tansanDOTeth and web3 pm @spacem404 under curation of @mulan_art
Ordinals are unique in a way that files are inscribed on sats (think of them as “cents” that make up a Bitcoin). Each sat have an ID (number) and text name (see below some cool sats). Since each sat is unique, artists could generate artworks based on sat numbers - this ensures randomness. This is the way of creating gen art that is only possible on BTC. It’s a big deal because art evolves with possible mediums (think how camera/computer changed art).
- Variety is ensured by having 10 color palettes and 24 shape sets inspired by de stijl, computer art, folk/tribal art glyphs and patterns, cryptography and abstract modern art.
- In the collection there are sats with different digit lengths - from 13 to 16. Olders sats are shorter in length. This introduces artwork size variety: 13x13, 14x14, 15x15 and 16x16.
- We used palindromic sats (they have reflection symmetry across a vertical axis). This makes all artworks perfectly symmetrical and create a feeling of orderliness. Additionally, sats with smaller unique digit count and sats with interesting combination of numbers create more interesting outputs.
- Some artworks have an animation trait. It was done to use another feature of BTC blockchain - halvings. On the attached video animation is looped but the actual files have 60 sec delay. In 2140 the delay will be 1 sec.
Ordinals have limitations. Inscribing large file sizes is costly so we needed to reduce file size as much as possible. This is how we did it: we blended 2 techniques: pre-gen and building the art at runtime. Each art was randomly assigned shapes for its sat during the pre-gen, then after its inscribed + loaded into the browser, we use recursive inscriptions and JS to build the art piece. Result: 3-4KB avg
