The final chapter in the storied Art Blocks Curated collection, Quine is a generative art project that blurs the line between its code and the art it produces.
The generator we created and deployed with Art Blocks did not itself produce visuals. Instead, for each Quine token, it produced a much smaller, more specialized, unique generator program. This in turn produces the visual output that incorporates its own code and possesses the quine property of self-reproduction2. The parent generator assembled each Quine’s codebase by stitching together snippets of code. Chief amongst these is the Quine’s engine, which is one of five algorithms used to create the patterns of colored pixels3. Other code snippets are responsible for symmetry calculations, color selection, and text layout.
A small number of Quines exactly recreate themselves and are called Perfect-Quines. But for the others we generalized the concept to longer loops. So, rather than the embedded code simply reproducing itself, it produces a novel, but related output. Then, when that new source code is run, the original code reappears. This can be called a 2-Quine, and it can be generalized to 3-Quine, 5-Quine, etc.4
Collectors who own N-Quines can enjoy them as a set of images, or, using Art Blocks’s PostParams5 technology, select which of the generations will appear as the “poster” for their Quine when others view it. A very small number of Quines are Pseudo-Quines, which keep creating unique outputs but never quite get around to looping back on themselves.
This is the final project in Art Blocks's Curated series, which has become one of the most significant collections in generative art history. Art Blocks created a platform where artists deploy algorithms that then generate the art with no intervention or curation, permanently and transparently. We created Quine as a celebratory way to close that chapter: a project where the code is not just the medium, but the subject.