fiducial markers

fiducial markers

500 living artworks from a single algorithm, released independently on Ethereum, minted August 11 to October 20, 2026.

Explore the 500
fiducial marker 460, painted in Cyanotype
№ 460 is awake: drag it, tap it, hold it. Turn the wheel to see it under any night until 2061.Arrow keys move a day, Shift with an arrow a year, Page Up and Page Down a month. Home returns to today.

From the 500

All 500
fiducial marker 9№ 9Xray fiducial marker 86№ 86Horizon fiducial marker 125№ 125Circos fiducial marker 63№ 63Palimpsest fiducial marker 373№ 373Sketch fiducial marker 12№ 12Galaxy fiducial marker 102№ 102Totem fiducial marker 29№ 29Confetti

What a marker does

It moves

Each plate paints itself in its own order, then keeps drifting: wheels turn, signals run along the ropes.

№ 375

It answers

Drag any part. Tap a peg to send a signal. Press and hold, and the art separates into its layers.

№ 461

It keeps time

One circle follows the real moon on all 500 at once. Eclipses, meteor showers, planets, comets and a birthday ring a year arrive on their real dates. Press M on a plate for its legend.

№ 2

It hides things

A faint word set inside one of its forms. The minter’s wallet as a ring of forty ticks. Press X, or double-tap, for the x-ray.

№ 333

On a keyboard

  • Xthe x-ray
  • Mthe legend of the sky
  • Vits layers
  • Epaint it again
  • Ssave it as a PNG
  • ShiftSsave it at twice the size

QHold five or more and every awake plate in your wallet carries your seal. Press Q for stereotactic planning mode; at fifteen, press Q again to examine the underlying neural connections via the tractography visualizer. On a phone, tap with two fingers.

The minter’s mark

Cryptography and provenance become part of the artwork, not just its metadata.

Every plate was created at the moment of its mint. The transaction’s hash seeded the composition, and the wallet that minted it was drawn around the moon circle as forty ticks, one for each character of the address, longer for higher digits. The plate can change hands. Its first collector stays written into it.

0x618d17fa 59c67aea 20a88dc7 5d4e28e7 28a6ff28

№ 390, minted August 24, 2026, seeded by transaction 0xb7fc8268…fd3e

618d17fa59c67aea20a88dc75d4e28e728a6ff28
Point to a character to find its tick.

The sky ahead

  • the moon
  • birthday rings
  • lunar eclipses
  • eclipses of the sun
  • Apophis
  • transits of Mercury
  • a Leonid outburst
  • Saturn’s rings edge-on
  • the major lunar standstill
  • Venus covering Regulus
  • the great conjunctions
  • Halley’s Comet
  • & many more

The emergence

The plates are waking.

Every marker is still and sleeps until its own week. Since Tuesday, October 20, 2026, a wave wakes every Tuesday morning, Pacific time, until all 500 are awake.

 of 500 awake

Next wave 

Recently collected

All activity on OpenSea

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In the studio, soon

X-ray film

The medium x-rays were read on for a century: a thin, blue-tinted polyester sheet coated with silver emulsion.

UV textured prints

Each paint layer raised at its own height, so the plate can be felt as well as seen.

Acrylic layers

Each layer represented on its own acrylic sheet, then stacked.

About

I’ve been making digital art since 2016 and minting art on the blockchain since 2021. This project is special to me because I feel like it is the first algorithm that conveys an entire story that takes an entire collection to tell.

Concepts of change, time, and phases are presented against the permanence of the fiducial, a fixed entity that helps guide you. In surgery, we use fiducial markers to navigate with precision to deep parts of the brain. In this artwork, they help guide your attention around the composition.

Read the essay on the algorithm