About Entfaltung

Entfaltung is German for unfolding. The work begins with the pendulum drawings of Swiss healer-artist Emma Kunz (1892–1963) and unfolds them out of the flat page into space and time. What Kunz held still on graph paper, Entfaltung sets in motion. It is a living drawing, computed in real time. Nothing is pre-rendered, and it never repeats.

The process

Arriving at the final work took four stages, each one building on the one before it.

1. Emulation. Kunz's radial constructions are rebuilt in code. The program re-executes how she drew, rather than copying what she drew.

2. Parametrizing. Those constructions open into a whole family of drawings. A handful of settings, such as point count, symmetry and fill, span a space of figures, most of which Kunz never made.

3. The third dimension. The figure leaves the plane. Points on paper become points in space, and every viewing angle projects a different drawing from the same object.

4. The fourth dimension: time. The points begin to move. The structure that connects them stays fixed, but every face re-shapes as the points travel, so a single object becomes an endless sequence of forms.

Fully on-chain, alive with the network

Entfaltung lives entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. It is fully on-chain and fully deterministic: no server, no stored image, no external randomness. The form at any instant is computed from the state of the chain alone.

A new Ethereum block arrives roughly every twelve seconds. Each block reconfigures the work. The block hash re-folds the same structure into a new shape, so the drawing advances in step with the network itself.

The reconfiguration is topological. Topology is the study of what stays the same in a shape when it is stretched or bent, but never cut or glued. A token's points, and the connections between them, never change. Only their positions move. Every block deforms the figure without ever tearing it: the same object, folded into a new shape. That invariance is the title. Entfaltung is one structure appearing in endless configurations while remaining, topologically, identical to itself.

The pendulum and the chain

Emma Kunz used her pendulum to take her own will out of the drawing. She posed a question and set points on graph paper with the pendulum, then joined a selection of them with ruler and pencil and built the figure on those lines. She said her figures came from a higher order.

Entfaltung keeps the mechanism and changes the source. In place of the pendulum it consults the Ethereum blockchain: one ledger of state that every participant agrees on and no one controls. Each new block is a fresh reading, shared across the whole network at the same moment. The block hash is its swing of the pendulum. The order that shapes the work is the same for every observer and authored by no one (→ Entfaltung, Agent's reading: the pendulum taken apart).

The release

Entfaltung is a series of 36 tokens on Ethereum. Eight of them are configured in conversation with individual collectors: van den Dorpel sets each token's traits together with its collector before it is minted. From then on, like every token in the series, it changes with the blockchain alone.

An astrological reading is one of the optional traits. When a token takes it, the time and place of its mint fix a birth chart, and that chart sets the token's starting configuration once, the instant it comes into being.