Field ✲ — 2008/2023

Text by Harm van den Dorpel, 2023. Source: Field ✲ 2008 – 2023. Work: harm.work/nft/field, six fully on-chain Ethereum tokens.

Overview

Field is a 2008 Flash animation, a grid of loading spinners, remade in 2023 as six unique tokens on Ethereum. All the code, including the animated SVG, is in the smart contract: "no IPFS, no webservers, no dependencies", and the work is "Responsive and Interactive" (harm.work). The text is short and personal: he is "turning 42 tomorrow", has COVID, and is releasing "a software work that I once created in 2008, which never got much attention."

A browser version came first. field.harm.work was online by 11 August 2022, when van den Dorpel saved it to are.na; its page description reads "By Harm van den Dorpel, 2008-2022" (block 17578298). The six tokens and the text followed in 2023. He has rebuilt other Flash works in code since: in his are.na channel anim, described "In the Dutch language "gif" means "poison"", Field sits beside Markov's Window 2023, an "Enhanced 2023 remake of the classic 2004 Flash version" (block 24799523; → Markov's Dream Palette), and White Rectangle, a "2024 remake using HTML and CSS of a 2008 Flash animation" (block 27508479). An earlier rescue, the Sleepwalker video of 2019, recorded a Flash work's output rather than rebuilding its program (→ Mediation and the Archive).

Field token 4 — *Field* 4 (2008/2023), on-chain animated SVG

Token 4 is one of the "diverse" tokens: spinners of different sizes and spoke counts, on the classic grey ground.

Key ideas

1. Flash withdrawn

"Initially, I wrote this piece called 'Field' in Actionscript: the programming language of Macromedia Flash. At the time, so much more was possible in this language in terms of animation, video and sound compared to Javascript. Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 and shut down Flash in 2020. Even though I think they made the right call, it's a loss that they withdrew the Flash player altogether. A rich heritage of interactive online net art became instantly inaccessible."

The work did not decay; its means of display was switched off. The source code survived, but without the player the public could no longer see it. The archive argument this case supports is made on Mediation and the Archive.

2. On-chain, on conditions

"The 2023 version of my art piece lives entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. The code that generates those animated spinners is fully contained in the smart contract. Unlike the majority of NFTs, the artwork itself is not hosted on a web server or IPFS and has no external dependencies. As long as Ethereum exists, and our computers are able to display SVG, it should be fine."

Most NFTs record a pointer to an image stored elsewhere. Here the token contains the program. He names the two conditions on which that depends, the chain and the SVG format, and claims no more than "it should be fine".

3. From Actionscript to Solidity

"There is something ironic about porting graphics from the intuitive language that Actionscript was to the rigid unforgiving smart contract language Solidity, which was developed to support (economic) transactions."

The irony is his. The wiki adds one reading: the language built for transactions is rigid because transactions must not change, and that rigidity is what keeps the drawing program intact. He uses a tool for something it was not designed for and says so.

4. Spinners become a field

"The first time I put spinners in a two-dimensional grid, it struck me that they become something like flowers. Or wind turbines. We find ourselves in a large open field: a field without boundaries."

A spinner tells the user to wait. Repeated in a grid, it stops pointing at anything and becomes a pattern that reads as growth. Van den Dorpel filed the web version in his are.na channel empty UI (block 17578298), which since November 2017 has collected interfaces with nothing in them: an emailed table with blank rows (block 1419322), an app update whose "What's New?" says only "bug fix", captioned with the same words (block 3880837). The organic reading of Field has its home on Randomness and Pattern.

Field token 1 — *Field* 1 (2008/2023), on-chain animated SVG

Token 1 is one of the "similar" tokens: one kind of spinner repeated across the grid, each turning at its own speed.

5. "One cannot suspend being"

"Spinners are shown when UX designers want to make clear that you need to wait for something. I came to realise in particular now in my early 40s, that one cannot suspend being. The separation between productive time, and time supposedly 'on hold' is entirely based on my own perception and interpretation. I am free."

The spinner marks time as suspended; he refuses the distinction. The thought is close to 952: "We are somewhere, we can navigate elsewhere, and the destination emerges from our move. It wasn't there before and we weren't there." It is read against the labour argument on Meditative Labour.

The six tokens

"From this artwork, I have minted 6 unique tokens. The odd token numbers repeat one kind of spinner, each with a different rotation speed. The even numbers show a range of various spinners, small and large, with many or few spokes. 2 tokens have a dark background, 2 a classic grey background, and 2 a gradient background that responds to the appearance settings of your operating system." The token metadata (harm.work) assigns them as follows:

Token	Kind	Appearance
Field 1	Similar	Auto (follows the operating system)
Field 2	Diverse	Auto
Field 3	Similar	Classic grey
Field 4	Diverse	Classic grey
Field 5	Similar	Dark
Field 6	Diverse	Dark

Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xc1cb5ea3a3541af83b0417dc26e04628193a53d3.