Meridian by Matt DesLauriers

Meridian is a set of 1,000 tall, narrow landscapes by Matt DesLauriers. Each output stacks ridges, valleys and bands of colour like layers of rock, and every layer is built from countless short marks, so a ridge that reads as a mountain from a distance breaks into texture up close. DesLauriers thinks of each token's hash as a set of coordinates that locates one picture in a vast space of possible ones. Most outputs mix two or more colours. About one in eight uses a single colour, including every output in the rare Prime, Charcoal, Newsprint and Invert styles, as in the Charcoal #738, where dark peaks rise out of mist.

The program is about 15 KB of JavaScript, kept on Ethereum in the Art Blocks contract, and it draws each picture from its token's hash. DesLauriers worked on it daily for two months and it shares some of its code with his earlier Subscapes. Meridian came out on Art Blocks Playground on September 28, 2021, as a Dutch auction, and it sold out about 25 minutes after the auction opened. A quarter of his proceeds from that sale went to the Processing Foundation. He wrote that the images are best seen large, and whoever owns a token can order a signed print of it, up to 150 cm tall.

Vetro Editions published a 240 page book on the series, designed by monopo London, with pages of favourites voted for by the Art Blocks community. Phillips sold two outputs in its 2022 sale on the history of generative art, and Sotheby's sold two more in 2024. LACMA received #547 in 2023 as part of the Cozomo de' Medici gift. In 2026 the artist gave the V&A in London large prints of #870 and #686.