New Artwork: Pixação Experiments

2026-05-30
A drawing in the style
    of a sak yant five line thai buddhist blessing tattoo, with lettering not in khmer but in pichação
    graffiti-inspired letters reading out random hexadecimal characters. (they’re quite hard to read though). The
    graphic is kept in simple, constistent thickness, black lines on white background. The letters are ornate, with
    some parts looking leaf-like, and all have a square outer shape.

I made a small piece of algorithmic art fusing a Pixação graffiti-inspired lettering style with a layout similar to a Thai Haw-taew (five row) Yantra blessing tattoo because it looks cool. Please have a look at the live version here.

The artwork encodes the latest NIST Randomness Beacon at the time of viewing, so it's the same for everyone viewing it simultaneously but it changes unpredictably roughly every 1-3 minutes. The beacon's hexadecimal content is inserted into the artwork with a Pixação-inspired font that I created. The artwork is loosely based on a Thai buddhist Sak Yant tattoo, but deviates from it in some details because it's not intended to be a buddhist spiritual artifact.

Keeping with the spirit of the five row Sak Yant tattoo it is inspired by, this artwork also conveys a blessing. However, where a five row Sak Yant tattoo blesses its wearer, this artwork is meant to bless your computer when you print it out and place it near it. Its blessing provides protection from unforseen circumstances by encoding the most unforseen of things: 120 bit of the 512 bit of entropy in a NIST v2.0 interoperable randomness beacon.

If you enjoy it, please feel free to share it with your friends. If you print it and you want to share, I'd love to see a photo of it. You can reach me through my email or on mastodon.

Here's the live version of the artwork.