Larva Labs on Quine and Code as Art

Upon being invited by Erick Calderon, founder of Art Blocks, to create the final release for the Art Blocks Curated collection of generative art, the founders of Larva Labs, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, realised it was important to put code at the heart of Quine, their first major project since 2021. 

They wanted, they tell Right Click Save, to honor how Art Blocks has, since its launch in 2020, used code on the blockchain to trigger the generation of artwork at the time of minting. The consequence has been a new form of art collecting where no one, not even the artist, knows in advance precisely what will emerge from the algorithm. 

In their new release, Hall says, they want to emphasize “the idea that the code is the art”. They also wish to reflect the multiple connections between Larva Labs’ first two releases — CryptoPunks (2017) and Autoglyphs (2019) — and the Art Blocks platform. Calderon acquired several CryptoPunks at their launch, later selling a number to fund Art Blocks itself. While he has pinpointed Autoglyphs, an example of fully “on-chain” generative art, as a seminal influence on the platform. 

‍“When Erick offered us this,” Watkinson says, “we wanted to make sure that we did something that was fitting of that honor.” It also felt right, he says, “because Erick talks about Autoglyphs being the inspiration that sort of pushed the Art Blocks boat away from the shore.” 

‍A homage to the computer science community‍

In their quest to give due prominence to the code, Hall and Watkinson recall reading the popular-science tome Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) by computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter, and how the writer used “quine” and “quining” to describe programs that reproduce their own source code. Hofstadter coined the terms in honor of Willard Van Orman Quine, a celebrated US philosopher known for Quine’s paradox: “‘Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation’ yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.” (A sentence that implies that it is false, but is paradoxical — for if it is false, what it states is in fact true.)

To honor code’s place in generative art, as well as the philosopher of self-referential paradoxes, Hall and Watkinson created Quine, where each unique artwork includes the program that generates it, extending Hofstadter’s computer science concept of a “quine” into visual art. 

In Quine, a main script writes a smaller program that renders the artwork. The source code becomes the composition, laid out to look like a code listing on a 78×148 grid, matching the proportions of the vertical screens typically used by coders. The code, as Hall puts it, “goes into the Quine, but also shows up in the Quine” with the source code’s text and symbols legible in the artwork. 

In their release documentation, Larva Labs describe the quine as a “kind of ‘strange loop’ […] a beloved concept in the computer science community […] linked with a lot of the most fascinating math and logic advancements in the 20th century, including [the Austrian logician Kurt] Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem [that in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved].”

Working from the principle that “the code can generate the art, but then the art can generate the code,” Watkinson says, guided them in developing the appearance of Quine as a “code grid”. “It is like a little code listing,” he says, “even though it’s this visual SVG graphic.” Watkinson says he is able to highlight the code in an SVG Quine graphic output, copy and paste it, and run it to produce the graphic from which it emerges — a self-referential loop where code replicates as art.

‍Quine and quinity‍

Hall and Watkinson have been playing with their algorithm’s quinity — the term they use to express the quality that defines the loop length of the quine. It starts with a “Perfect quine”, or 1-quine, that, as Hall puts it, “just makes itself: the original definition of ‘quine’.” But then there are n-quines — where the generator loops back after multiple steps — where the “n” is both the number of steps and the number of output works. For a number of works in the project, the token produced at minting contains three, five, seven, or 11 works (defined as a 3-quine, 5-quine, 7-quine or 11-quine). (The algorithm also works with pseudo-quines, where unique outputs are generated indefinitely without looping.)

“It’s a tricky concept,” Hall says, “because the whole idea was, ‘it’s one thing, unique, and the generator produced it for you.’ Now it’s like a thing that produces some number of things, which is fun and interesting [and also] slightly complicated.” The ability to play with quinity gives collectors more agency. With a multiple-work output they will have an option after the minting process — PostParam — to choose which image from the generated work to show on Art Blocks and on marketplaces, with the ability to alter that choice at any time. 

“What has been nice about the PostParam is that it gives you, the collector, some agency,” says Hall. “You choose as the collector what you think is the best output from your generator.” 

‍The liminal and sub-liminal‍

The make-up of Quine is a reminder that, as the artist and writer Robert Alice says in On NFTs (2024), all NFTs come down, ultimately, to text. Hall and Watkinson describe text and symbols from the source code that appear outside the colored cells on the artworks as “liminal”, and those that occupy colored squares as “sub-liminal”. The squares are made up of black, white, and 10 colors.

“This was maybe the first project where we really had to think about color in an abstract way,” Watkinson says. “Obviously, with CryptoPunks and Meebits [Larva Labs’ 2021 release of voxel-based 3D characters], we were using color, but that was always driven almost practically […] colors based on what things are. But here we had to think abstractly about color, which was kind of a first for us.”

He describes a pleasing element of personalization in the process, where Larva Labs signs off its work in the code. The Quine output produces a comment at the end of the code where Larva Labs can say “this is Quine 74.1. […] the generation number. If you switch your PostParam to three, this would say 74.3 [indicating that the collector has opted to show the third artwork output in a multi-Quine] and then ‘by Larva Labs’.” “It’s kind of fun that we get to sign our work right inside the work,” Watkinson says.

‍Five engines for five types of visual‍

In developing the structure and aesthetics of Quine, Hall and Watkinson created five separate engines — the core algorithms used to lay out the grid and structure of the artwork. Each engine produces a different type of visual, with different force calculations written into the engine.

The Shape engine overlays shapes, Watkinson says. The Glyph engine is “loosely based on the Autoglyphs algorithm”; the Force engine “takes a series of horizontal and vertical lines and applies Newtonian forces”; the Ribbon engine uses “force-based calculations to have flowing ribbons intersect with each other”; and the Lattice engine looks like “encoded television patterns”. One additional parameter included in most of the engines is called Space, Hall says. It can be either Euclidean or non-Euclidean: the former operates in a curved-space geometry; the latter produces outputs in a straight-line geometric space with elements taking the shortest distance between two points.

The test mint outputs shared by Larva Labs demonstrate variety within a harmonious whole. They also hint at the foundational work of mid-century modern generative textile designers and printmakers such as Anni Albers and the quilters of Gee’s Bend, mixed in with a technostalgia for code listings and television test patterns. 

‍The state of long-form generative art‍

Asked to survey the horizon for generative art on the blockchain in 2025, Watkinson considers the effect of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools on the art form. “There’s this feeling in the community of almost a crisis because of AI tools,” he says. “I’m not sure I feel that way […] but it does feel like we are going through a transition where maybe those [AI] tools will bring a broader community [where artists who] are not highly technical [....] feel empowered in this space […]. I think that there will be some change and hopefully some growth and new ideas, new people coming into the space.”

“We’re still very much fans of long-form generative art,” says Watkinson. We still love this methodology. It just feels so right: the Autoglyphs/Art Blocks model where the artist publishes the algorithm, then everyone takes part in the minting. And then you have this fixed set size, which is such an interesting way to explore an otherwise infinite algorithm — to have this sort of limited set of mints. It’s a great way to collect and to interact with the artwork.”

Reflecting on the duo’s future, Hall says, “we feel like we’re still just getting started, that there’s so much to explore here. “Even Quine is an interesting way to expose algorithms and the strangeness of them [...]. But also the blockchain brings all these mechanisms into it. Even the fact that there is going to be an auction happening on the blockchain is a form of interactivity. But there’s so much more to explore there, too.” 

“Autoglyphs is one of those things [where] the blockchain is part of the medium. It’s not just the algorithm that produces the output. So I feel like there’s lots to explore there still,” says Hall. 

‍Standing behind the algorithm ‍

As Art Blocks leaves the final output of an algorithm open to chance, it was the average quality of the test mints that consumed Hall and Watkinson in the lead-up to the launch of Quine; to maximize the chance that, when a Quine token is minted, the result will be up to the aesthetic standards they aspire to.

Watkinson describes the challenging final stages of developing the algorithm. “Early on, when you’re making these things, you’re picking the winners,” he says, “you’re [saying], ‘Look how cool this one looks.’ And then at some point along the process, you have to decide to switch into that mode where you have to start thinking about the average output or even maybe the worst possible output that these things can produce — because [at the time of minting] you have no control over it. So then your standards go way up. You say we need every one of [the outputs] to stand alone… We got to a place where we were pretty happy with everything but we were getting results where some percentage of the results just weren’t up to the standards that we wanted. And so we were back tweaking the algorithm, controlling the parameters, just trying to get it where we felt good about everything.” 

“That is what’s interesting and engaging about this Art Blocks model. You really are just standing behind the algorithm, not its outputs; and that’s a really cool aspect of it,” says Watkinson. 

Hall and Watkinson are not sure what to expect once Quine is released, when collectors can choose which artwork from a Quine with more than one generated image to display on Art Blocks. “It will be interesting to see”, Watkinson says, “how many people change their choice of which image to show, how often they change it, what they pick versus what Larva Labs would have chosen.” 

“I like to have that feeling of uncertainty. We certainly had it with Cryptopunks where it was like, ‘will anyone care about this?’ With Autoglyphs, [it was the] same kind of thing a little bit. That was at a time when there wasn’t a lot of interest really in crypto art. How are people going to react to this? How are they going to use it? 

I think the [the use of] PostParams is, for us, maybe the biggest mystery of this one. How will people interact with it? And it’s nice to have that feeling of ‘We have an experiment here that we don’t know how it’s going to work out.’ It’s going to be interesting to see how the community responds and how they use it.” 

Towards the end of development, Hall says, when they were “dialling in the thing,” a lot of the time their favorite output from a specific Quine was not always the first. “It’ll be interesting to see if people care, if they agree.” He is interested to see whether that element of choice, “is going to be a ‘thing’. It will be fun to find out.”