Stained Unravel

Series of seven tokens and one Museum Proof, fully on-chain on Ethereum, 2026. The seven premiered in Senescenence, Nguyen Wahed with Interface Gallery, New York, 3 April – 2 May 2026; the eighth, Blockade, in Munich in May 2026.

A tall screen leans against a white brick wall, showing a pale lavender and pink field of cells. Three framed plotter drawings hang beside it; a visitor walks past the shop window.

Stained Unravel is a set of generative animations "built upon a cellular automaton in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life" (harm.work). Note 3000 sets out where it departs from Conway's rules: an extended vocabulary of shapes instead of alive and dead, neighbours compared on exact positions instead of counted, a colour that changes while a cell stays the same, and touching cells merged into groups. The note's verdict is that the work is "in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life, but also a profoundly more complex version of it, and finally a diversion." The series exists as animated tokens and as plotter drawings of their outputs (→ The plotter drawings below).

The seven works and the Museum Proof

The seven series tokens share the 23-shape vocabulary, a pool of 54 curated rule-sets (with a randomly generated rule-set at half of all reconfigurations) and the same timing. Their on-chain presets differ in palette, ground colour, cell size and a final saturation boost (token data). Each palette is a list of gradients: a cell takes the start colour when it changes shape and moves toward the end colour while it rests. The saturation boost means the screen is not the stored palette: muted stored colours can appear close to pure ones. The eighth token, Blockade, changes the rules and the timing as well.

The artist's are.na channel records when the seven became seven. On 12 March 2026 it lists seven named versions, Paper, Spring, Game, Night, De Stijl, Stained and Markov's Dream, each linked to its number on stained.harm.work (Spring, Paper). Paper did not stay, and Mother of Pearl came after. The title Spring is noted "Title per A. Zenith" (block).

Spring.

Medium grey ground. Four gradients: red ageing to blue, passing through violet; white to amber-gold; black to white; teal to blush pink. In the token image broad horizontal bars of merged cells in pink, magenta and violet lie over diagonal lattices of small blue and orange triangles, with open grey between them.

Game.

Black ground. Seven gradients, the most of the series: bright yellow ageing to orange, bright red to brick, bright blue to navy, and four that start on white and end on medium grey, dusty rose, red and deep indigo. In the image a large dark rectangle of fine diagonal hatching fills the centre and right. Along the left and top runs a dense texture of small yellow, orange, red and blue cells in rows and columns.

Night.

Black ground. Four gradients: coral-red ageing to deep blue, yellow to olive, mint to red, white to dark grey. The bright colours are where the gradients start, so a cell that has just changed shows coral, yellow or mint and darkens or shifts as it rests. In the image small triangles in yellow, mint, coral and violet cover most of the frame. A large triangular region of vertical stripes in coral, violet and yellow runs down the left side. A black notch is cut into the right edge a third of the way down, and below it the cells thin out into separate triangles on black.

De Stijl.

Pinkish off-white ground. Five gradients, each moving only slightly: near-black to a warmer near-black, ochre to a darker ochre, sage to a deeper sage, slate blue to a cooler slate, brick red to terracotta. According to the artist the stored colours were taken from paintings by Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg around 1920: muted period colours, not RGB primaries. The screen changes them. The renderer multiplies this token's saturation by 1.5, and the image shows red, yellow, blue and green diamonds and stripes close to primaries, on the pink ground, crossed by diagonal bands of blue and black. The stored palette is the paintings' colour; the rendered image is nearer the primaries De Stijl is remembered by.

Stained.

Parchment ground, rgb(210,205,183). Six gradients, every one ageing toward a pale colour: crimson to light grey, navy to pale grey, olive to straw, white to the ground colour, and black to the ground colour twice. Three of the six end on the ground itself, so the oldest cells sink into the background. In the image a broad band of dark diagonal stripes in brown, navy and crimson runs from upper left to lower right: the cells that changed most recently. The upper-right corner is a pale grid of cream and straw, where cells have rested longest. Here the staining of the title is easiest to read.

Markov's Dream.

Medium grey ground, rgb(176,176,176). Five gradients that barely move: green, magenta and blue each shift only slightly in intensity as they age, black lightens to dark grey and white dims to near-white. The frame above, taken from the running animation at stained.harm.work/6, shows triangular clusters of chevron-shaped cells in green, blue, magenta and violet standing apart on open grey. Violet is not in the palette; it most likely comes from cells easing between a blue and a magenta group colour.

The palette is the one van den Dorpel picked for Markov's Window (2004), "pure, fully saturated RGB colours": blue, green, magenta and a black-to-white gradient (3002). Note 3002 lists this token as its third return, after Markov's Dream (2022) and Markov's Window 2023. A palette chosen for a work named after memoryless chains here colours a system whose staining is a memory (→ The Markov's Dream Palette).

Mother of Pearl.

Medium grey ground. All five gradients start on white and end on pale lavender, sandy cream, white (no change), blush pink and black. A cell that has just changed is white whichever gradient it carries; only while it rests does it show lavender, cream, pink or, along the fifth gradient, black. In the image the upper right is banded horizontally in pale pink and lavender, the left side runs in vertical stripes, and fine clusters fill the lower left, with a few black marks where cells have rested longest. Its displayed colour trails its target by about five seconds, against 1.7 seconds in the other six and 3.5 in Blockade, so the pale tints stay visible longer. In the program its preset is named "Ice".

Blockade.

The eighth token stands outside the series proper. Its on-chain description counts the edition as "7 + 1 MP tokens" and marks Blockade apart as a Museum Proof, "a commissioned work made in response to Herbert W. Franke's Move (Blockade) (1991–94)", first shown inside Apple's European Chip Design Center in Munich, curated by Margit Rosen. Move (Blockade) is a QuickBASIC program for the IBM PC by Herbert W. Franke, and Blockade repeats its title. The artist says it takes its cues from Franke's "CRT palette and square-patterned grids"; both can be traced in the code. The exhibition and Rosen's text are on Franke × van den Dorpel — Vectors, Apple Munich (2026).

Black ground, which is also the ground of Franke's screen. Nine gradients, the most of any token: white ageing to black and black to white; orange to a dark olive-brown and white to that same orange; magenta to black and white to magenta; a dark blue brightening to full blue; black to green; and black to black, a gradient that never leaves the ground. Orange and magenta each end one gradient and start another, so the same colour can mark a cell that has just changed or one that has rested a while. The dark blue, rgb(0,0,170), is the blue of the IBM PC's 16-colour palette. Beside Franke's frame the palette shares black, orange and brown, white, magenta and blue, and adds a green.

In the token image the cells are small and the field is dense. A diagonal edge runs from the upper left toward the centre. Below it, on the left, cells have drawn out into long vertical streaks of blue, green, white and brown. A horizontal break about two thirds of the way down starts a zone of horizontal bands, and a cluster of diagonal magenta and orange forms sits in the lower-right corner.

Blockade is the only token whose difference reaches the rules. The program carries 67 curated rule-sets. The seven series works draw on the same 54 of them, and at half of all reconfigurations they generate a random rule-set instead. Blockade never uses random rules. Its pool is closed at 18: ten from the shared pool, among them Rings, Flippy, block 1 and block 2, and eight that no other token uses. Four of those eight carry Franke's first name in the code: Herb Cube 1, Herb Cube 2, Herb xj and herb switch.

Almost two thirds of the cell kinds named in the eight are kind 9, the full square, against one in seven in the shared pool, where corner triangles are the most common kind. Herb Cube 1, for instance, turns a cell into a full square when the cell two rows below, or two columns to either side, is one, so whole squares spread across the field at a fixed spacing. The square-patterned grid the artist took from Franke is written into the rules as well as the image.

The timing is retuned too. The seven are written for 60 frames per second and Blockade for 90, so on the same screen its automaton steps more often. A cell that rests reaches the end of its gradient in under a second, against two and a half seconds in the seven. The colour on screen trails that target with about twice the delay of most of the series, and shapes morph at three fifths of the series speed. The grid changes state quickly while shapes and colours lag behind it.

The cell vocabulary (→ 3001)

Each cell is a quad, a four-point polygon, that morphs between 23 shapes:

Empty and full sit at the extremes. Between them every triangle and rectangle type appears in four orientations, and the flat and standing triangles fill the same corners at two aspect ratios.

The rules (→ 3000)

Note 3000 names three mechanisms.

1. Positional comparison. Conway's Game of Life counts how many neighbours are alive, wherever they sit. Stained Unravel "compares neighbours on exact positions with multiple masks, ie. 'if the neigbours top left and top right are square, then this cell needs to become a triangle'. Because the position matters, it can be considered a 'bitmap' compare." The first rule that matches sets the cell's next shape; if none matches, the cell keeps its shape. The wiki compares this to a loom, where the exact position of each warp thread decides which thread comes forward. The analogy is the wiki's; the Senescenence press release names "the binary logic of the weaving loom" only as the start of a lineage running through pixel graphics to the GPU (→ Senescenence, The Grid).

2. Staining. "Cells in Stained Unravel count the amount of iterations since a cell changed. Gradually, when a cell remains in the same configuration as in the previous iteration, the cell colour transitions between a start and end colour." Each of the seven palettes sets its own start and end colours, so the direction of the change differs per work and per colour, but in all of them colour records how long a cell has kept its shape.

"Stained" also names a window, from the first day of work. The are.na channel Stained Unravel opens on 13 January 2026 with screenshots taken from 05:04 that morning: diagonal bands of small triangles and half-squares in teal, pink, orange and yellow-green on black (block). The same morning he filed the east window of Lincoln Cathedral (block) and a clerestory window of Winchester Cathedral (block); Chartres followed on 18 February (block). A medieval window is a field of small pieces of flat colour separated by dark lead. The screenshot beside it is a field of small cells of flat colour separated by black. The press release lists stained-glass windows among the work's references.

3. Merging. "When cell edges touch they become one shape and form a group, with one colour." Large regions of shared colour form and later break apart again; the break-up is the unravelling of the title.

From time to time the rule-set in force is replaced: by another curated set or, in the seven series tokens, half the time by a randomly generated one (token data). The automaton does not stop; it changes rules.

Agent's reading: death as one shape among 23

Thesis. The April 2026 draft text on the series: "Birth, survival, and death are not the rules but their consequences" (draft). The wiki repeated it, here and on Senescenence and Process Legibility.

Antithesis. Note 3000 says nothing of the kind, and the code contradicts it. Rules map neighbour patterns to shapes, and one of those shapes is the empty cell: the last rule of Herb Cube 1 empties a cell whose left neighbour is a full square (token data). Death is stipulated by rules, as in Conway. Staining and merging colour and group cells; they decide nothing about life or death.

Synthesis. Conway's rules have a two-word vocabulary, so every rule is a rule of birth, survival or death. Stained Unravel's rules choose among 23 shapes. Death is the change to the empty shape and survival is the case where no rule matches. Birth and death are kept as rules but demoted to two cases of shape change, which is why note 3000 can call the work both "in the tradition" and "a diversion". The press release's "death is not failure but the system's natural feature" fits this: the empty shape is one state the system passes through, not its end.

The plotter drawings

The Senescenence exhibition showed the seven tokens with plotter drawings that trace "the same generative logic into an anachronistic register" (press release): Hatched Lining, Stitched Gaze, Chroma Husk and Sealed Solids. Later drawings from the algorithm include Archive Static, Thresh, Diagonal Fault and Vesper (→ The Grid, Early Plotter Drawings). Each comes with an NFT of its source; harm.work lists Hatched Lining and Archive Static as coming "with Arweave SVG NFT". The five source files form the collection Sources (2026), which calls each SVG "a score" for the plotter to perform (→ Small Collections). A plotter draws lines and cannot fill a shape, so the drawings build the automaton's triangles, squares and half-rectangles out of hatching.

Close up, each cell of Hatched Lining is a patch of short parallel strokes in blue or red-orange. Where cells share a shape the strokes line up into bands; where shapes change, the direction of the strokes turns. The edge of the oak frame runs down the left side.

In Stitched Gaze every cell is a patch of short parallel strokes, horizontal, vertical or diagonal, some in two pen colours side by side. Long bands of hatched cells break up at their ends into loose triangles, diamonds and half-squares, and a nested diamond, one lozenge inside another, recurs in several places. Its source SVG is token 3 of Sources, Stitched Gaze. Ember Bloom (2026) is "Based on an output of my 'Stained Unravel' algorithm" and "Comes with a source NFT" (harm.work); that token is still to be minted (the artist, November 2026). It is denser: the cells cover almost the whole sheet, and blocks of hatched squares, in which the grid stays visible, alternate with rows of one small pointed shape repeated cell after cell. Both drawings are 43 × 61 cm framed.

See also

• Interruptions — the successor (2026): the same rule engine, grouping and staining run on a rotating line after Vera Molnár; five tokens
• Senescenence — the exhibition; death as the system's natural feature; the loom-to-GPU lineage; Albers, Anni and Stained Unravel
• Franke × van den Dorpel — Vectors, Apple Munich (2026) — Blockade in its exhibition; Margit Rosen's text; beauty and ageing
• Process Legibility — the image as the record of its own construction
• The Markov's Dream Palette — the palette of Markov's Dream across 22 years
• The Grid — the series among the practice's grids; the later drawings
• Randomness and Pattern — few rules, much complexity
• "Magicians Conceal, Artists Reveal" — a text in the archive on concealment, with Stained Unravel as its example