Learn About the Chromie Squiggle
The Chromie Squiggle story begins in 2017. The creator, Snowfro (AKA Erick Calderon) had a ceramic tile business, but in his spare time he tinkered with coding, projection mapping, 3D printing and generative art.
Squig Me!He heard about a new NFT project created with Ethereum smart contracts called CryptoPunks. Enamored with these cute 24 x 24 pixel faces, he eagerly began claiming them (including the zombie that he still uses for his profile picture). This sparked an idea: What if, instead of presenting all 10,000 outputs and letting people choose their CryptoPunk, the contract presented claimers with a random one? This would make the process fair and would add an element of suspense, like opening a pack of trading cards. This idea led Snowfro to create Art Blocks, a platform for a whole new kind of art.
Snowfro on Twitter with CryptoPunks zombie profile picture
Art Blocks is a platform for projects within a movement called generative art. Rather than style or ideology, generative art is defined by its creation process. It is not created by the artist directly, but by a manual or digital system they design. This gives each output an element of randomness. Generative art techniques have been used to create music, literature, architecture and visual art. With the advent of modern computing, “creative coding” became the generative artist’s most important tool.
rarity: 10.70%
rarity: 63.43%
“What if, instead of presenting all 10,000 outputs and letting people choose their CryptoPunk, the contract presented claimers with a random one? This would make the process fair and would add an element of suspense, like opening a pack of trading cards.”
Before Art Blocks, generative art outputs were typically curated. The artist would select their favorites and discard the rest. Smart contract technology allows for a new model. One in which every output is directly minted by a collector. In this paradigm, the artist no longer has any creative control past the design of their system. They must take great care to ensure that all of the outputs will be interesting and unique. They must also decide the right number of total outputs for a given system. This model has been dubbed “long form generative art.”
Art Blocks featuring Chromie Squiggle
In 2020, Art Blocks released its first project: Chromie Squiggle. One goal of Chromie Squiggles was to show the full potential of long form generative art. With this in mind, the system was designed to produce an extremely high number of unique outputs. But the Squiggles also embody the ideals of Art Blocks in other ways. Art Blocks seeks to evolve art, how people interact with art, and how communities exist around art. In that spirit, Chromie Squiggles are more than a static image on a screen, they are animated and interactive. They are also vector graphics, meaning they can scale to any size without a loss of image quality.
How to Interact with Squiggles
Within Live View (on desktop)
- On Click: Toggle color cycling
- Spacebar: Cycles background color
- Up/Down: Adjusts speed of color rotation
- Shift + Up/Down: Set color rotation speed to maximum /minimum
How to Interact with Squiggles
Within Live View (on mobile)
- On Tap: Toggle color cycling
Initially collectors could mint their own Chromie Squiggle for 0.035 ETH, with the total number of Squiggles capped at 10,000. Seven weeks and 9,000 mints after launch, Snowfro decided to pause minting. The remaining 1,000 Chromie Squiggles would be saved for special events and for rewarding important contributions to Art Blocks. As of June 6, 2022, 9,625 Chromie Squiggles have been minted.
Chromie Squiggle 101
For those new to Chromie Squiggles, here’s a handy reference chart of the different types of Squiggles that exist and their rarity to help kickstart your journey to full Squiggle appreciation.
rarity: 0.40%
A Guide to Full Spectrum and Perfect Spectrum Squiggles
Total Color Hue Formula: (segments*steps between)/color spread = total color hues
This means 255 hues are displayed AFTER the starting hue, resulting in all 256 hues displayed, making this perfect.
You can use this formula to see how many color hues are displayed on ANY squiggle. As color spread drops, more color hues are displayed and as color spread increases, fewer hues are displayed.
Perfect Spectrum Squiggle
Only a single combination of color spread, segments, and steps between segments will result in a perfect out come.
Full Spectrum Squiggle
The number of hues displayed must come within 1% of perfect. There are only 2 combos of color spread, segments, and steps between segments that will create a full spectrum, making it roughly twice as common as perfect spectrum but still VERY rare in the squiggle universe.
Squiggle Dashboards
Deep dive NFT data and analytic tools for the more voracious alpha hunters.
rarity: 4.60%