It’s December 2nd and another late evening in London. I'm chatting with a like-minded collector, both of us anxiously waiting for fxhash to reopen so we can mint some unique 1 of 1 generative art. With 12 minutes to go until opening, we’re in discussion:

Seventeenblack: What are you minting on the open in 10 minutes?

Tomfromv: I think Disegnatori…. I already minted 2, they are great, but I want a “blueprint” one.

Seventeenblack: I’m not sure how I missed Disgenatori, the blue is deep and beautiful.

Disegnatori (Italian for 'draftsmen') was first released four days prior, on November 29th, 2021, with 250 editions. It was Erik Swahn’s second release on the platform and precursor to the superlative Farbteiler collection.

Disegnatori #16 builds from simple to complex

At the time, fxhash was barely a month old and didn’t allow collectors to mint 24/7, hence the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ schedules. So, when fxhash was closed, we spent vast amounts of time navigating the site for unminted gems (meaning projects with mints left to give). By the time minting opened again, I’d have accumulated endless browser tabs lined up for the mad dash to snag good-looking projects before they minted out.

After Tomfromv called Disegnatori to my attention, I added it to my tabs and went in at the opening bell. There were 43 iterations remaining that took all but 25 minutes to mint out — an eternity by today’s fxhash standards where 250 editions disappear in a single block.

Disegnatori #74 features a rare color palette

In Erik’s own words, Disegnatori “...learns a different portion of a city map, looking at it stroke by stroke and creating a probabilistic Markov model of the sequences of relative angles and distances, tracing the outline of each building in that portion of the map. This way, each disegnatore has a different internal understanding of the city.”

Essentially, each iteration draws from the same map of Rome, where every polygon (building footprint) has been converted to a text file. The transaction hash interacts with the text to determine which parts of the map to include in the model. Each polygon has a 50% chance of being included, so the different iterations are based on different subsets of the same source map.

This way, each Disegnatori output features unique Markov Models depending on the subset. The script keeps drawing until a certain number of line segments have been added.

Tomfromv was correct. The royal blue background is something to behold, but so are the other colour palettes — white on red, monochrome, and Mondrian; beauty in simplicity.