Chain of blocks

Artwork ➢ Chain of blocks Artist ➢ Roberto Ranon Text ➢ hex6c and Roberto Ranon

As a digital ledger, a blockchain is a chain of linked blocks. Each block is a container for data, including metadata like block number and creation timestamp, as well as a list of transactions. Each block has a fingerprint called hash that is used to certify the information content of the block. Blocks are chronologically concatenated into a chain by adding to the block a field with the hash of the previous block in the chain. Since the hash of each block is computed including the parent hash, it follows that the block hash encodes all previous history of the blockchain. The first block of the chain, called the genesis block, has no predecessor block.

The artwork Chain of blocks - a 4000 x 6000 px PNG image, generated by a custom JavaScript line-drawing algorithm inspired by Jared Tarbell's Substrate - uses boxes and lines as the basic graphical elements, resembling the diagrams that illustrate complex systems such as computation flows, distributed networks, blockchain architectures, and more. The algorithm begins with a grid of boxes, and then generates lines that grow from them, creating various curves and branches. The lines have different styles and shapes depending on the boxes they are connected to or cross over.

There is a contrast between the black & white palette and the organic shapes of the lines. The black & white colors suggest a binary logic, a digital world of zeros and ones. The lines, however, resemble the forms of plants, roots, veins, or nerves, suggesting a natural world of growth, adaptation, and communication. Are plants engaging in a form of emergent, distributed computation, or is computation a natural phenomenon that transcends human-made devices?

The drawing algorithm randomly changes the grid of boxes and the lines every time it runs. Out of hundreds of iterations, this one was selected as the final result.