Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs

Fidenza is a program by Tyler Hobbs that drew 999 pictures, each one a single run of the code. It starts by laying a flow field across the canvas, a grid of directions that shifts from one spot to the next. Then it packs that field with thick, curved blocks of color that follow the directions without touching, so even channels of background run between them. Fourteen palettes and seven scales set most of the look. Rarer modes wind the field into a spiral or fill the shapes with small squares.

Hobbs had been working with flow fields since 2016 and called Fidenza "my most versatile generative algorithm to date." It came out on Art Blocks Curated on June 11, 2021, and all 999 were minted in under half an hour. On Art Blocks the picture does not exist before the mint. The script is stored on Ethereum, and each mint feeds it a random hash that fixes the output. Hobbs did not curate the results, so every output is exactly what the code produced.

Fidenza #313 set a price record for an Art Blocks work that August. Since then Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips have all offered outputs at auction, and in 2025 the Toledo Museum of Art showed Fidenza #370 in Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms. Hobbs later called the series "a big test" of keeping one algorithm interesting across 999 outputs.