Mathcastles

Mathcastles is a studio run by two anonymous developers who go by 0x113d and xaltgeist. Its medium is Ethereum itself: smart contracts compute the work as it runs, an approach the studio calls runtime art. Outland reports that the studio has not offered any work for sale since 2021.

Terraforms, its first series, launched in December 2021. Each token is a 32 by 32 grid of text characters that animates, and each is a parcel in the Hypercastle, a twenty-level structure held as data in the contract with no official rendering. Zones set the colors, biomes set the glyphs and a trait called chroma sets the speed. An owner can replace a parcel's terrain with a drawing of their own and store it onchain. Collectors built their own explorers to picture the whole structure. Kevin Buist wrote in Outland that the project "is a reminder that the best virtual worlds are imagined, not simulated."

In September 2022 the studio wrote the three.js and p5.js libraries into Ethereum storage so other artists could use them. That December it began Zero Suite, works that use zero-knowledge proofs to keep a drawing hidden while proving facts about it. The first, zero glimpse sunflower one, appeared in Uncomputer, an online show curated by Grailers DAO for Unit London in 2023. A second, Angelus, hides its own price inside a secret drawing. In August 2023 Glitch in Marfa, Texas showed Level 7 at {22, 3} for a month in its Every 30 Days series.