Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak

Ringers is a set of 1,000 drawings of one idea: a string wrapped around a set of pegs. Dmitri Cherniak says he spent three whole years playing with that system. Each output samples its pegs from a grid, sorts them around their center and wraps one unbroken string around them, then fills the shape and colors the ground. Most are black and white with a single yellow peg. About one in five has a colored ground, and smaller groups add a red, blue or green peg, ringed bullseye pegs, or a smaller form the script labels smol boi. Some read as bodies, creatures or objects. The best known is #879, The Goose.

Ringers came out on Art Blocks Curated on January 31, 2021, at 0.1 ETH each, and the public sale sold out in under twenty minutes. Cherniak chose not to mint any for himself that day. The script is stored on Ethereum and draws each output from the hash of the transaction that minted it, so neither the artist nor the collector picked the image. He had generated the full set on a test network first to see how the traits fell, and he has said he sees all 1,000 together as a stronger work than any single Ringer.

In August 2021 The Goose sold for 1,800 ETH, an Art Blocks record at the time. In 2023 Sotheby's sold it for $6.2 million, his auction record. The ZKM in Karlsruhe holds #182, and #962 is a promised gift to LACMA. In 2025 the Toledo Museum of Art hung 25 Ringers as a five by five grid.