Original Frame

Generative art has intrigued me ever since I first heard about the concept of code based art. Everything from the Squiggles to the Autoglyphs. As usual, when something peaks my interest to the level gen art has, I have to learn how it works. I learned a little bit by exploring the p5.js web editor. It's an easy to use web interface where you can write simple code based art and render it. I explored some different things, and then turned the code into a canvas function. The function generates a random image based on a very simple algorithm and uploads the image to imgur and returns it back to the user in the frame.

NFT Frame

Edit: After posting the original frame, which just let a user generate a random piece over and over, I got hundreds of users commenting on the post and quite a few were asking to mint their piece. So I added the option to mint a piece directly from this frame. I wrote a contract that capped supply at 5200, deployed it to Base and loaded up my wallet with ETH to pay for gas fees. Within the first 12 hours, 1300 were minted. The beauty of frames, is that for as long as the Farcaster protocol lives, the frame will be available for users to mint from (until supply is capped of course).

Breakdown

Here's a diagram for how I got things to work. I heavily leveraged the Pinata FDK to get the generated piece and associated JSON onto IPFS.

Potential Meaning

The great philospher Alan Watts once said "When you want to draw a map of a person's soul, you draw a map of the universe as it was when he was born". I realized when people were initially using the frame, since the noise in the piece is based on FID, the generated piece can be a visual representation of what Farcaster was like at various moments. As DAU grows, people will wonder what Farcaster was like in the early days. You can revisit my frame, and generate a piece to answer that question.

And for FID less than 200, they got a completely different algorithm and background color, which could show that for the very early users, their experience of Farcaster might be completely different than anyone else's. Some examples of under 200 FID: