New Home: Engine

This series of visualizations depicts data from the perspective of an observer who is embedded in some way in that data. Often data is depicted as apart from the observer, such as on a two-dimensional plane, like a graph. It is held at arm's length. Away from the self. This series asks the observer to imagine themselves intrinsically situated relative to some data, from a given perspective.

This exercise can alter one's sense of scale and dimension, sometimes in imposing or mysterious ways.

These first three tokens for "New Home" pertain to The Merge, and they use simple, stark sentiments many of us feel: excitement, enticement, mystery. What future is beyond TTD 5.875e22? We can envision The Merge with brilliant, vibrant and colorful complexity. My aim here is to express a curious cognitive dissonance for many of us watching the Ethereum wizards work. The Merge gives us a feeling of imposing potential that is uncertain and mysterious and exciting. Bright energy, about to go off, on the backdrop of that alluring and unknown future.

In my 2021 series "Ethstory," visualizing the history of Ethereum, I used code as a medium for expressing various aspects of Ethereum's history. For example "Clients" and "64 Shards" use the execution layer consensus layer code to express particular technical and historical aspects about Ethereum. "Engine" uses this theme again, but takes all data sources from those two pieces in "Ethstory."

On the left quadrants of "Engine," the initial codebase for two early execution clients (top-left: geth, bottom-left: parity); on the right quadrants, early codebase for two popular consensus clients (top-right: lighthouse, bottom-right: prysm). I extracted source files from early GitHub releases, sequenced them with a bit of filtering and portioning for length, then wrapped them into loops consecutively, from the center out to each corner. They overlap at quadrant edges.

In "Engine," the observer now narrows their view, focusing, zooming inside the machinery of the system. Distributed components are weaving together, communicating. A small energy signature, microscopic compared to rings of "Portal," but rich and complex in their activity.

Ethereum will navigate this space with a new engine. A churning computational core, whirling embers of a distributed governor engine. Not so much energy now as coordination.