I was talking to my friend Stephen today about Autoglyphs. Autoglyphs are a series of NFTs where the code for the image for the NFT is generated by the smart contract itself. Here is the smart contract. There are english instructions that explain how to draw different symbols.

This was inspired by Sol Lewitt, and to me that is the first thing that comes to mind when looking at this work.

We can then render these instructions however we want. On the Autoglyphs website there is an example of these being rendered by a plotter on paper. There are also examples of these being rendered as ascii art. Each autoglyph has a different set of symbols that it uses to draw. – this is very clever. For example the symbol for this autoglyph is

I am interested in the rendering engine. It would be cool if blockchain had a rendering layer. In the web this was separated into the browser/application layer. We could generate a image in the smart contract – or the binary for an image.

It would be cool if the smart contract could represent itself. This separation between form and content is so 18century.

Anyway – I do think this is cool – to store generate art in this way. I am thinking about this in many different ways. More to come