Quantizer

Collection: harm.work/nft/quantizer · Verse SOLOS exhibition: verse.works/exhibitions/quantizer · Exhibition text: Quantizer — exhibition page

This page is the home of Quantizer as a work. Quantization and dithering as an artistic operation are on Quantization and Dithering.

The collection text on harm.work:

Every twelve seconds, a new composition is seeded directly from Ethereum block hashes, synchronizing viewers worldwide in a shared visual experience. The work's deliberate instability and absence of memory reflect Harm's broader artistic philosophy, highlighting the inherent impermanence and poetic potential of generative digital art.

Collection

• Title: Quantizer
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 256 tokens
• Blockchain: Ethereum mainnet (contract 0x23b72f7458a204446983f544d655df10f70533e9). The token metadata points to a page at quantizer.harm.work that renders each composition. The work is not stored on-chain: the page fetches each new block hash from an online API, which makes it, in the artist's words, a crypto-"dependent" work (November 2026).
• Programme: Verse SOLOS, August 2025, his second exhibition there after Struggle for Pleasure in early 2024
• License: CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The mechanism

Each token receives its traits at mint, a "grammar" of shapes and rules in the Verse text's word, and keeps them. From then on the image is generated live: with every Ethereum block, about once every twelve seconds, the latest block hash is read as a seed and a new composition is drawn from the token's traits. Because the block hash is the same for everyone, all collectors see the same composition at the same moment, anywhere. In the Verse text, "Gaussian noise and dithering give these transitions a fluid continuity."

Two kinds of memory need keeping apart here. Across blocks the work has none: each composition depends only on the current hash and the token's traits, and nothing carries over from the one before. Inside a composition, shapes nest in shapes up to a set depth (maxDepth, 1–8). Asked about the algorithms of his mandala works, Quantizer among them, the artist said: "I often use Markov Chains: the distribution of a certain step or operation happening is stochastically determined by the parent the new shape is in" (Mandala Q&A). That chain runs in space, from container to contained, not in time from one block to the next.

A large bevelled orange square at the centre, framed by rings of smaller bevelled squares in magenta, ochre, yellow and lavender, each surface carrying a fine dithered grain.

Traits

Every token carries eight traits (read from the trait data of all 256 tokens on harm.work): Root, Source Palette (Mandala 137 tokens, Dream 106, Monochrome 13), Source Colour Count, Dithering Palette, Dithering Algorithm, Gradients, Vignette and Complexity.

The root is one of twenty-four values: Array, Block 9, Bricks, Checks, Circle, Circle 8, Double, Edge, Flower, Japan, Lozenge (see The Lozenge), Mandala (see Sacred Geometry), Margin, Pointing Inwards, Portal, Quad, Raster, Ring, Rotate, Split, Split Rotate, Star, Thangka (the most common, 35 tokens), and Tibetan.

The Verse text lists further generative parameters: maxDepth (1–8), colour seeds, noise values (1–20), overlay frequencies and gradient intensities.

Dithering algorithms

Each token pairs one error-diffusion method with one of two ways of measuring colour distance. Error diffusion maps each pixel to the nearest palette colour and passes the difference on to pixels not yet drawn; the methods differ in how far and in what proportions they spread it. The eleven methods in the work, with the number of tokens using each:

• Burkes — 51 tokens, the most common
• Jarvis–Judice–Ninke — 50
• Sierra-2-4A ("Sierra Lite") — 31
• Sierra3 (three-row Sierra, after Frankie Sierra) — 28
• Atkinson — 20; developed by Bill Atkinson at Apple, it passes on only six eighths of the error, which gives a high-contrast look
• Stucki — 19
• ShiauFan2 — 18
• Fan — 15
• ShiauFan — 10
• Sierra2 (two-row Sierra) — 10
• Floyd–Steinberg — 4; published by Robert Floyd and Louis Steinberg in 1976, the first error-diffusion method

The distance measure decides which palette colour counts as nearest. Euclidean takes the straight line between two colours in RGB space; manhattan adds up the differences in red, green and blue. The two agree when colours differ in one channel and disagree when the difference is spread over several, so the same palette and method can map a pixel to different entries. Of the 256 tokens, 99 use euclidean and 157 manhattan.

Palettes

The dithering palettes fall into two groups. One is the colour sets of computers and game consoles from the 1970s to the 1990s, from the Fairchild Channel F to Windows; the Verse text says only that the palettes "recall the chromatic signatures of systems like the IBM CGA and ZX Spectrum". The other is palettes named after records and moods. The wiki reads the hardware palettes as strata of computing history rather than nostalgia (→ Quantization and Dithering); that reading is the wiki's.

Each palette name below links to its trait page on harm.work. Twenty-nine palettes are carried by tokens. Three in the catalogue, Monochrome, Milieu 2 and Custom 2, are carried by none; their trait pages are empty.

Custom 1 — 10 colours

CGA — 16 colours

The original IBM CGA 16-colour palette (1981).

CGA (high) — 4 colours

CGA's 320×200 palette 0 at high intensity: black, light red, light green and yellow.

EGA (high) — 4 colours

Named after EGA in the work, but the four colours, black, light cyan, light magenta and white, are CGA's 320×200 palette 1 at high intensity.

EGA (low) — 4 colours

Also named after EGA; black, green, red and brown are CGA's palette 0 at low intensity.

Apple II — 15 colours

The Apple II lores palette (1977).

Mac Default 16 — 16 colours

The default 16-colour Macintosh palette.

Microsoft Windows — 17 colours

The Windows default 16-colour palette; the work's list has 17 entries, with white twice.

Commodore 64 — 16 colours

The Commodore 64 palette (1982).

Commodore 64 (no black) — 15 colours

The C64 palette with pure black removed.

Commodore VIC-20 — 16 colours

The earlier VIC-20 palette (1980).

ZX Spectrum — 15 colours

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum palette (1982).

A screenshot of the game Explorer shows a handful of the Spectrum's colours in use: cyan sky, two greens, yellow huts, black trees and a red and black sphere inside a blue border. The machine allowed two colours per 8×8 cell.

MSX — 15 colours

The MSX 15-colour palette (1983).

The test image renders a parrot in the MSX's fixed colours, listed in a strip on the right: salmon and red, mustard, three greens, two blues, cyan, violet, grey and white.

Thomson M05 — 16 colours

The French Thomson MO5 palette (1984); the trait spells it M05, with a zero.

RISC OS — 16 colours

The RISC OS default desktop palette (Acorn, 1987).

Gameboy (simulated) — 4 colours

The four green tones of the original Game Boy DMG screen (1989).

IntelliVision — 16 colours

The Mattel IntelliVision palette (1979).

Magnavox Odessy 2 — 16 colours

The Magnavox Odyssey² / Philips Videopac palette (1978). Note: the trait URL preserves the source spelling Odessy.

Fairchild Channel F — 8 colours

The Fairchild Channel F (1976), the first home console with programmable ROM cartridges.

RGB — 5 colours

The three additive primaries with black and white.

RGB (no black) — 4 colours

Monochrome — 6 colours

Carried by no token. A near-grey scale with a slight warm tint at the light end.

Named emotional palettes

The second group is named after records, a musical form and moods rather than devices (→ Colour, palette as proposition).

Loveless — 9 colours

Named after My Bloody Valentine's album Loveless (1991). Its pinks, reds and browns match the album sleeve; the vault does not record whether the artist took them from it.

The sleeve is a blurred, pink and red photograph of a guitar neck.

Melancholic — 7 colours

Tibetan — 8 colours

Magenta, yellows, cream, ultramarine, green and a dark red; named after Tibet, as are the roots tibetan and thangka.

Ocean — 6 colours

Ostinato — 5 colours

After the musical ostinato, a repeated motif.

Overflow — 8 colours

Stochastic Drift — 11 colours

The sleeve shows a faceted polyhedron on black, its faces blue, violet, orange-red, green, teal, pink, pale green and dark navy. The palette is named after Sam Barker's album Stochastic Drift and its colours match those faces; the vault does not record whether the artist took them from it.

Milieu — 8 colours

Named after the ambient musician Milieu (Brian Grainger), whose Vibratelepathic Antiviral Broadcast releases on the Vibra Telepathos label share one cover style.

Milieu 2 — 7 colours

Carried by no token. The cover has a pale yellow ground and a grey disc filled with yellow, blue and light blue dots, the colours of the swatch below.

Custom 2 — 5 colours

Carried by no token.

Sand mandalas and impermanence

The Verse exhibition text ties Quantizer's pace to "his long-standing fascination with impermanence, shaped in part by the Tibetan Buddhist practice of sand mandalas: intricate compositions created over days or weeks, only to be swept away in a ceremonial gesture of release" (→ sand mandala). It quotes the artist:

The most interesting aspect of generative digital art is that it is inherently unstable and ever changing. This is a quality I want to retain, so I resist arriving at immutable outputs.

Brian Droitcour, in his essay "Beautiful Rules" (Outland, 2025), describes the work as a single web page that can be collected but not fixed (→ Protocol, Taste, and Systems). A composition belongs to its block; when the next block arrives it is gone, and since block hashes do not repeat it will not return.

A circle inside nested grey and white squares, a diamond of small squares at the centre, and deep blue shading toward the edges.

Anicca

Anicca (2025) is planned as eight two-phase animations "inspired by Buddhist sand drawings"; two tokens exist. The title is the Pali word for "the absence of permanence and continuity" (harm.work). In the Murayama Q&A the artist calls Anicca his "first attempt to construct [mandalas] algorithmically" and says he "went deeper into their construction later in the NFT series Quantizer"; "the traits reflect this, and are even named", pointing to the roots tibetan and thangka (Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama).

Plotter drawings

The artist: "The algorithm from Quantizer I extended to transform surfaces to lines by hatching, into something I could mechanically draw with a plotter. This can be seen in the works Anobium, Nethermind, and Nethermind Quilt" (Mandala Q&A). All three were shown in Cloud Writings (Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2026).

The are.na channel Quantizer shows screen and paper a day apart. It opens on 6 July 2025 with four screenshots; the first is a grid of squares and nested squares filled with dithered gradients in blue, red, yellow and cream (block). The next morning he filed a phone photograph of a square ink drawing: squares inside squares, each filled with short dense marks in salmon, blue, grey and magenta (block). The Verse series page followed on 26 July (block).

Nethermind is a "plotter drawing based on an output of the Quantizer algorithm" (harm.work). In the detail, cells and bands are filled with short strokes in pink, brown and ochre; the direction of the strokes changes from cell to cell, and maze-like runs fill some squares.

Nethermind Quilt is a square sheet of nested squares broken into a chequer of small hatched cells in pink, grey, olive and pale green, with a darker square and a pink triangle at the centre.

In the detail of Anobium, meandering single lines in red, blue and black pack the cells, denser and darker in some regions than in others. harm.work: "The title refers to the most common species of woodworm, which is actually a 🪲." The artist says he titles works after making them, "based on how they appear to me" (Mandala Q&A).

Exhibition

A free-standing screen in a concrete hall shows a coarse grid of coloured squares, its light reflected in the floor.

Verse SOLOS presented Quantizer in August 2025. From the Verse journal:

• Harm van den Dorpel: Quantizer, algorithmic archeology, and digital preservation (2025-08-21)
• Harm van den Dorpel and Regina Harsanyi: the early days of Club Internet, the ephemerality of time based media and the birth of Quantizer (2025-08-18)

See also

• Quantization and Dithering — quantization of colour and of time; dithering as device and anchor; note 3002 on print and screen
• Colour — the practice's modes of colour, with Quantizer's hardware and named palettes
• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — Droitcour's reading: rules made perceptible; collected but not fixed
• Mandala Q&A — Goro Murayama (2026) — the mandala references, Anicca, the plotter works
• Cloud Writings (2026) — Nethermind, Nethermind Quilt and Anobium in the exhibition
• Sacred Geometry — the mandala among the practice's rule-based geometries
• Predecessors of Entfaltung — the block-hash engine Entfaltung inherits
• Works Overview — chronological catalogue