Terraforms by Mathcastles Explained: Onchain land art from a dynamically generated 3D world (Open Edition)

This video was created to help newcomers enter and understand the world of Terraforms by Mathcastles. The video was created by Matto during the production process of Hypercastle Explorers, a community extension project built on Terraforms to create a Unity game engine SDK for the project. The video is a snapshot of a moment in the history of Terraforms and the emerging scene around Mathcastles and runtime art.

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Terraforms by Mathcastles Explained: Onchain land art from a dynamically generated 3D world (Open Edition)

This talk was originally written to accompany an exhibition at NFTBerlin in May of 2022. In it, I seek to provide a concise view of the Terraforms artwork by the Mathcastles studio along with a bit of information about our related project Hypercastle Explorers. Importantly, Terraforms are relatively deep and complex and so for a longer and more detailed Terraforms explainer, Ive linked to the community slide deck in the video description.

Terraforms is an NFT project by the studio Mathcastles which consists of 0x113d and xaltgeist, two anonymous developers. The project consists of 11,000 NFTs which the developers describe as onchain land art from a dynamically generated on-chain 3D world.

Terraforms can be engaged in multiple ways. At a base level, each token is a piece of animated art rendered on a 32x32 grid of text characters, stored in an SVG file. The animated art is drawn in a web browser using javascript to change the colors and cycle characters of a custom made font.

Each token contains properties including Zone, Biome and Chroma. There are 75 different Zones which correspond to color palettes and 92 Biomes which refer to which text characters or shapes the grid for the animation. The Chroma property governs the speed of the cycling of the animation. The combination of these properties gives the collection depth and variation and in my opinion gives an appealing diversity to Terraforms overall. While many generative art collections choose to issue smaller editions of for example 500 tokens, Terraforms can be seen as something of a response to the NFT meta trend of 10,000 unit generative profile pictures pioneered byCrypto Punks. The collection seems to pose an answer to the question: how does one create a generative art collecti on with 11,000 pieces that feels rich, varied and not repetitive?

In addition to appreciating Terraforms as individual art works, they also can be approached as a single fractionalized work of invisible art. Along with its internal characteristics each token is also assigned structural metadata which are displayed in its name: Level 11 at 18,6 for example. This data situates each token as a part of a larger 3D structure informally referred to as the hypercastle. The hypercastle has 20 vertical levels and narrows to a point at the top and bottom, with the widest points at levels 13 and 14. Importantly, each token also contains structural information about its internal elevation, in which the visible shapes in the 2d artwork correspond to elevations in a three dimensional map. This structural information is encoded in the smart contract of each token and can therefore be referenced and reproduced by calling the tokens functions on-chain. 

In addition to functioning as both a 2D and 3D artwork, Terraforms also is a functional software tool in which each token can be transformed into a kind of drawing program which overwrites the existing Terrain artwork. The tokens have three modes, Terrain whicccch displays the land art animation, Daydream which enables a user to draw on it and Terraform mode which commits the drawing back to the blockchain for others to view. Transitioning from Terrain to Daydream mode is a destructive operation and cannot be reverted, but a Terraform can be transitioned at will from Daydream to Terraform and vice versa, overwriting and committing new drawings to the chain.

This idea, of Terraforms as an artwork with both visible and invisible layers, stored on a public and permissionless database which anyone can read from and interact with is a new and compelling one. It feels like a truly blockchain native work of art which seeks to deeply explore the possibilities of this technology as an artistic medium. The approach of building a minimalist but beautiful, durable skeleton creates a kind of aesthetic negative space which encourages other artists and explorers to join in and engage with it. Until the fairly recent creation of blockchains and publicly shared but privately ownable computer environments like Ethereum a work of art like this wouldnt have been possible, and it wouldnt have been possible for people like us to build alongside it. Through the development of this new technology and the arts and culture around it, new possibilities are emerging and we look forward to exploring them together.


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