Reflections on Terraforms by Mathcastles
In September of 2021 I began to witness what would go on to become Terraforms by Mathcastles.
Time spent in the Mathcastles Discord Server revealed the project to have two founders: 0x113d and Xaltgeist.
On December 17th 2021 the project was officially launched. For every NFT, animated unicode character art was revealed alongside a description of a position in a larger 3D structure e.g. Level 16 at {19, 6}.
To learn more about the project I suggest reading and watching:
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‘Terraforms by Mathcastles’ by Matto (video summary)
In this piece of writing I will be exploring three reflections.
I hope you enjoy.
Reflection One: Impermanence
Prior to 2021 the only art I had ever collected was a hand-painted Mandala Thangka. I had been travelling in Nepal and bought the artwork as a keepsake.
On arrival back to the UK, that Mandala Thangka was chewed by my dog.
You could say that it was here that my love for digital and durable (non-dog-chewable) artworks began.
I was excited to learn that Terraforms by Mathcastles was ‘very onchain’.
Importantly for me, the Ethereum blockchain provides durability and immutability that no single dog can take a bite out of.
It is the things that are durable, the things that last, the things to return to; that offer some comfort within the midst of change. Though even these things; like ancient trees, Blockbusters, or sunsets, eventually reach the end of their life-cycle - giving way to the next thing. Everything changes - that’s impermanence.
Impermanence, that as George Harrison puts it: “All things must pass”, can be a depressing notion. I was upset when the artwork I had carefully chaperoned back to the UK was promptly chewed by canine. In a similar way, the euphoric highs, generosity, and encouragement of a bull market have slowed into the bitterness, desperation, and ugly competition of a bear market. Thankfully, these things don’t last either.
In recent times, prominent digital art appreciators and NFT collectors such as artnome have warned of the potential perils of centralised file storage and we may find the art of today is not suited to the technologies of tomorrow.
So the question is: What does it mean to have truly durable digital art?
Terraforms by Mathcastles approaches an answer to this question. Firstly, all of Terraforms is immutably onchain. Terraforms will exist for at least as long as Ethereum exists, all the assumptions of durable decentralised ledgers included. Going one step further, the way that Terraforms is constructed is minimalistic, allowing durability beyond the current context of computing. What does that mean? It means that Terraforms is not only durably stored, it is also durably designed. Essentially, the fundamental layers of the project are simple enough and precise enough for multifocal interpretation. In contexts of future technological advancement the work is positioned to be easily re-interpreted. Pretty neat.
Whether or not Terraforms will survive into the next era is unclear, but your neuralinked grandchildren may explore Terraforms yet.
Whilst the onchain and minimal nature of the work provides durability, the creators have also introduced a number of unstable elements into the work. In other words, Terraforms is changing. The artwork itself is dynamically computed on Ethereum as the runtime develops. Another way to think about the artwork is as a living-digital-process. Incorporating a built-in lifespan, features that respond to smart contract interaction, a decay function, and a floating like motion to the whole 3D structure, transience and movement are imported into an immutable artwork.
The artwork is expected to outlast anyone who is alive today (~10,000 years), but it is ultimately perishable. The artwork will decay, collapse, and cease to exist. Interactions with the artwork from collectors via ‘Daydreaming’ extend its lifespan, but the end is unavoidable.
The artwork that we look at today will not be the same artwork we look at in a months time, even if nobody interacts with the piece onchain. The project will most probably outlast us all and yet will not escape a similar fate.
Unlike many of the generative works that have captured the imagination of audiences in the past two years, Terraforms is in action and alive. Changing, tethered to choice, and at the ultimate mercy of time.
Just like us - maybe.
Reflection Two: Interpretation and Perception
Contemplating one of the Terraforms in my collection, Parcel #301, Level 11 at {23, 13}, I am reminded of Bridget Riley and her op art work.
Firstly, because Parcel #301 is similar to some of her work in the visual sense. Her most famous works of the 1960s are monochromatic pieces of black-and-white.
Secondly, because both Terraforms and Bridget Riley’s work prompt reflections on interpretation and perception - obtusely and purposefully inviting the mind to be part of the work - albeit in slightly different ways.
I had the pleasure of viewing some of Bridget Riley’s black-and-white compositions at the Hayward Gallery in late 2019. I mused for hours, staring at each work, almost falling into them. Static works danced and played tricks on my mind to bring movement into my personal experience. Existing less as objects to be examined and more as generators of perceptual responses in the eye and mind.
Famously, Bridget Riley wished to make the space between the canvas and the viewer ‘active’.
“I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place.” - Bridget Riley
Terraforms by Mathcastles can be thought of as a modern-digital version of this intention. However, rather than directly activating the sense perception faculties of the mind, Terraforms as an invisible 3D structure is a step removed. Latent in the work an invitation is extended towards the viewer to be an active force in how the artwork is perceived.
0x113d has described the animated unicode character art of Terraforms as the ‘packaging’, with the truest nature of the piece hidden or as to our eyes; invisible. The visual interpretation of the artwork displayed on Opensea and other marketplace platforms only *one of* the possible interpretations. The 3D structure has no canonical visualisation at all.
The invitation extended towards the viewer is: Make it as you imagine it. Create whatever you can from the reality at hand. Build on-top of Terraforms at whatever layer of depth you are comfortable or competent.
Both Bridget Riley and Mathcastles explore the relationship between reality and mind, though how they invite individual experience into the work and the ways in which they emphasise our relationship to experience are different.
For Bridget, the interaction is direct. The nature of her work leaves no room for re-interpretation. All of the experiential effects are received through the fabric of mind interplaying with the shapes on canvas. The known aspects of the work are invited into uncertainty using perception as the medium. We are generally passive participants, played with without our own creative agency.
In Terraforms, the artwork is invisible and the invitation of mind into the artwork is abstracted through the medium of computing. Ultimately, however, the active mind of a participant is necessary for the known aspects of the work to be crystallised into perceivable visuals via choice in computational execution. The known aspects of the work are invited into uncertainty using interpretation as the medium that precedes perception. We are invited to be active participants, played with with creative agency.
In both cases the interplay between mind and matter is approached with fearlessness. The objects exist on-chain/on-canvas and of mind simultaneously.
In both cases the mind is a medium in which the art plays.
In both cases we are prompted to be aware of the relationship between raw data (or reality) and our experience of it.
There are ways of talking around the relationship between reality and experience that explore the productisation of computer technology for public consumption or the potential for reality to be a computer simulation. However, my inclination is towards exploring individual experience as processed by our body-mind in relation to the underlying reality of whatever existence is.
Bridget Riley exposes us to the powerlessness of our position, whilst Terraforms by Mathcastles re-introduces us to the power of it. We are not merely passive-consumption agents in the world of Terraforms by Mathcastles, but active-participants. We have agency in how we choose to interpret and interact with what we are presented and can begin to shape our reality accordingly.
Terraforms encourages a celebration of the availability of choice within subjectivity, whilst Bridget Riley’s work encourages a reflection on the uncertainty inherent in subjectivity itself.
Bridget Riley reminds us of that which we do not know and the existence of factors beyond our control. Terraforms reminds us of our ability to choose what we can know in acceptance of those factors that are beyond our control.
What reality is is ultimately uncertain. Science often only gets us closer to understanding what it is we don’t understand. Gratefully, however, the situation is not merely that we do not know, but that we are beings with the power to do something with what we do know.
What we perceive is shaped by our interpretations. What may be an entirely non-malicious action can be perceived as an intentionally malicious one if interpreted in a certain way. Perhaps even now we are interpreting our own mental processes in ways that lead to perceptual solidification, where there is actually the potential for creativity. How does experience change when we take a more open stance in relation to how our own minds work? Is there a space between our experiences and our thoughts about them? What might be found in that space?
Whilst I may look strange examining the consciousness reflecting aspects of these works, whether in swaying back and forth in front of ‘Blaze 1’ in the Hayward Gallery or forming long sentences of personal feelings published online and shared in public, I do not feel it.
I only feel that important truths are being delivered by virtue of the sharp and soft, precise and yet playful, use of two realities: black-and-white and zeroes-and-ones.
Reflection Three: Interbeing
Since being introduced to Interbeing at a Meditation Retreat in 2019, I have returned to the concept over and over again. Interbeing permeates everything, perhaps because it is everything. When I try to distill what it means to Inter-be, words like connection, interaction, and interdependence come to mind.
That’s the kind of situation we find ourselves in.
I am kept alive by the air transformed by plants in conspiracy with the sun. I am some kind of derivative of the food my ancestors ate many centuries ago.
A taxi-driver in New York transports a passenger that sends a message to a doctor in London that indirectly reminds her to eat before 11am so she can call the banker to talk about his blood sugar levels on his lunch-break. Despite the call, that banker collapses in a meeting with the Prime Minister - a series of events that rushes the decision on the cost of import taxes on the avocados I spread on my toast. I skip on buying the avocados because for that price they’re not really worth it. I buy a shirt that afternoon. Many years ago a young African man leaves his family in Zimbabwe to go to university on a scholarship. Many years later his son goes on to become a fashion designer for a high-street brand. The shirts he designs lead to compliments at a festival that boost my ego whilst a different family in Bangladesh breathe in polluted air produced by a factory that pumps out many shirts that are almost exactly the same.
A week later I go back to buying Avocados at an inflated price.
All the things are entangled with one another, directly and indirectly. The past was so the present could be and the future depends on the present as the past. We are it. This is it. Here we are. Here we go. It is beautiful and tragic. Incredible and terrifying. Hopeful and Hopeless.
Terraforms is a reminder of this reality. There is a newness in what is being presented by Mathcastles but a familiarity in the way it makes me feel. It’s nothing we didn’t already know. Though it can be helpful to be reminded; Everything is connected.
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Unlike many artists publishing work on the blockchain today, 0x113d and Xaltgeist started the work on Terraforms from a different vantage point. Whilst many today are using Ethereum as a storage facility for their art or incorporating the blockchain as a factor to influence the output visuals whilst still situated primarily in another medium; Mathcastles are different. Mathcastles are using Ethereum itself as their medium and the artwork is calculated on the Ethereum Virtual Machine continuously.
The specialness of this choice is that the Ethereum blockchain is what 0xParc call an ‘Autonomous World’. As an autonomous world, Ethereum enables interobjectivity. This is the ability to find consensus realities(what is or isn’t possible) whilst maintaining individual autonomy (our ability to choose what we do in acceptance of those factors that are beyond our control). 0xParc speak in terms of Autonomous Worlds reducing or removing intersubjectivity. For Terraforms, intersubjectivity is reduced but as a non-visual object the reduction is non-total. This means that whilst there are formalised rules for interaction and interoperation with the artwork, a high-degree of creative freedom remains intact.
There are a three main layers at which the artwork can be worked with by the creative:
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Interpretation - via transmutation of the non-visual into the visual.
As we have already covered, the unicode character art of Terraforms by Mathcastles is but one possible re-interpretation - other visualisations are possible and already exist (e.g. Terraflows by yeetljuice).
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Interaction - via the existing Mathcastles deployed smart contracts.
‘Daydreaming’ is the smart contract interaction that allows parcel owners to transform individual parcels into canvases for drawing on. Drawings can be committed onchain via a further interaction - ‘Terraforming’.
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Interoperation - by deploying new programmes onto the Ethereum blockchain.
The publicly accessible computation of Terraforms onchain instantiates the possibility for an ecosystem of interoperating programmes to be deployed. A scene of people have already been writing software that interoperates with Terraforms. It’s durability instilling confidence that the world of Terraforms is a scene worth contributing to. A dependable presence in a space that moves fast.
Everything a publicly accessible onchain artwork like that of Terraforms by Mathcastles can lead to is unknown.
What is known is that Terraforms is the reference point for a new kind of ecosystem to emerge. The ability of Terraforms to act as a source of ‘dynamic truth’ creates this possibility. In this ecosystem transiently consumed fixed-form artworks are replaced by a digitally located interactable, ever-changing, and co-owned spatial idea-form with an interobjective consensus layer for endless discrete-yet-connected additions.
The best metaphor that I have for the current state of the ‘what-could-be-ecosystem’ is the Electron Cloud Model of an Atom. There exists a cloud of potential around a nucleus. Terraforms by Mathcastles is that nucleus. Potential exists in relation to the nucleus. Realisation of that potential is open to anyone who can observe the possibilities of the field.
It may take some time to take shape but the field is wide open.
For me, the possibility of such an ecosystem is a reminder of participation in a field where changes in one place are connected to another in more than one way. There is a basic openness at the fundamental level and a way in which wholeness is present in every state.
This is Interbeing.
Thank you for reading.
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