Cycles by Material Protocol Arts is a network sculpture composed of space and time, a meditation on recurrence and change. Time and its manner of repeating appear as themes in art and metaphysics through the ages. Heraclitus steps into and out of a river, a new man each time while history draws irregular spiral loops, rhyming and stuttering out its story.

At its core, Cycles is a network artwork deployed on the Ethereum network. It comprises an abstract kinetic sculpture of rotating rings, composed of 512 individual lenses. Each lens represents a unique simulation, moving through parametric space and offering viewers a window into complex, evolving patterns. By using Ethereum as a networked computer, the artwork can develop over time and accept interactions via the network. Using blockchain technology as material for art making offers artists the chance to make artworks that are new in the context of art history: those that continuously evolve, record their own history, and run autonomously with minimal intervention. Leveraging Ethereum’s distributed nature and economic incentives, Cycles aspires to operate on an extended time scale allowing viewers to live with and experience its changes over years, decades or centuries.

Cycles is a dynamically running network artwork. This distinction is important because in the history of computer-generated art, many artists have focused on designing computer systems to generate outputs such as drawings, videos, or sound recordings. This is a respectable tradition but this approach fails to express the dynamic and interactive nature of computer programs as artworks themselves. Cycles attempts to explore these qualities by creating a dynamic network artwork that runs continuously and autonomously on Ethereum, shifting the focus from the product of an art-making algorithm to the system itself.

Dynamism is a prerequisite for interactivity which Cycles allows for its collectors. The piece includes a method to stop a lens’ movement by freezing it. This causes the lens to focus continuously on the same point in space, causing the changing qualities of its simulation to be fixed and allowing collectors to control its aesthetic presentation. Freezing is a weighted decision. Once a lens is frozen it will require certain conditions to be unlocked. Methods for unfreezing lenses will be unlocked over time. The fact that the behavior of the sculpture can be affected by lens owners means that its future state is non-deterministic and will never be able to be fully predicted.

In technical terms, Cycles is composed of Solidity, JavaScript, and SVG code, stored and computed on the Ethereum blockchain. This design avoids external dependencies, ensuring the artwork’s longevity and resistance to technical failures. While the current form of Cycles is complete, its nature as a software artwork allows for potential future development through non-destructive updates or connections to other systems.

By rendering systemic processes as aesthetic experiences, Cycles offers viewers a unique perspective on the passage of time and the nature of change. It invites contemplation of the cyclical yet varied patterns that characterize both natural and human systems. As viewers engage with Cycles over extended periods, they are encouraged to reflect on their own relationship with time, change, and recurrence, viewing the artwork as a lens through which to observe the interplay of repetition and variation that shapes our existence.