Animating Quines for Larva Labs

Summary

“Quine” by Larva Labs A couple months ago, when I was first planning to go independent again, I ran into my friend, John Watkinson, on the walk home from my studio. John is half of Larva Labs along with my good friend, Matt Hall, and they’re responsible for industry-defining projects, like CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs. I actually sat next to them when they were first working on CryptoPunks, and they asked if I wanted to have any. I remember telling them that I was too busy working on Cushion to be bothered. So that was cool. In any case, we caught up for a bit and I mentioned my plans to return to freelance life. John had an immediate lightbulb reaction, as if this was perfect timing—and it was. It turns out Matt and John were weeks away from announcing a new project, and they were looking for someone to animate it. A quine at 100% scale Matt invited me over to their studio, where they told me about Quine. In their words, “Quine is a generative art project that blurs the line between its code and the art it produces.” At first, these quines just look like cool procedurally-generated pixel art. And, while that’s true, if you look closer, you’ll see that there’s real code embedded within each quine. Matt explained to me that if you extract the code and run it, it’ll generate the next variation of that quine’s sequence. I was immediately intrigued from that concept alone, but it goes even deeper than that. Each quine has a number of characteristics, including one that Matt and John refer to as its “quinity”. This can be a 3-Quine, a 5-Quine, a 7-Quine, etc. Basically, the quinity relates to the quine’s generation loop. For a 3-Quine, if you would repeatedly extract and run the code within each quine generation, after the third generation, it’ll loop back to the beginning. A 5-Quine will loop after the fifth generation, etc. As an engineer, I caught myself chuckling and shaking my head at how cool and clever this is. And, if you’re a sucker for collectibles, it gets even ...