A drawing project in 9,801 parts
Ninety-nine,
squared.
One hand. Ballpoints and pencils, nothing else. Nine thousand eight hundred and one A4 sheets turned sideways, each with its own unbroken recording of the hours it took — and every road running off one sheet arrives on the next. Together they are one invented city.
No sheets published yet · this page updates as each one is finished
The archive
Every drawing has one place, and only one.
Ninety-nine by ninety-nine, and one map. Every road that leaves a sheet arrives on its neighbour, so what fills in here is not 9,801 pictures but a single fictional city drawn a page at a time. Sheets may be drawn in any order; because every sheet is A4 landscape, the finished map is itself an A4 landscape.
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Method
Constraints are the work.
A set of rules fixed before the first sheet, published here, and not revised. They are what separate a series from a pile of drawings — and what make the ten-thousandth sheet belong to the same object as the first.
Why 9,801
9,801 = 99². The grid is the work's structure made visible.
99 is a Kaprekar number. Split its square into 98 and 01 and they add back to 99 — a thing that breaks apart and returns to itself.
1 ÷ 9801 = 0.000102030405… — the decimal counts off every two-digit number in order before it repeats. One fraction that contains the whole sequence.
A4 is the only paper that survives being tiled. Its sides are 1 : √2, so 9,801 A4 sheets in a 99 × 99 grid form one larger A4. The archive has the same shape as any page inside it.
9,801 is odd, so the map has an exact middle sheet — the only one with an equal reach in every direction.
- Ballpoint and graphite only. Any nib width, any pencil grade — but nothing else. No ink wash, no digital correction, no colour. Every sheet records which widths were used.
- One A4 sheet, landscape. 297 × 210 mm, always turned sideways, always the same stock. The format never changes across 9,801 drawings.
- No erasing. A wrong line stays and is drawn around. Every sheet carries its own mistakes.
- One sitting per sheet. A drawing begun in a session is finished in that session, or it is discarded and the slot stays empty.
- Recorded whole. Nothing enters the grid that was not filmed from the first mark to the last, in one unbroken take, and published with the hash of that file.
- Order is free, edges are not. Any sheet may be drawn at any time. But a sheet is drawn against its finished neighbours, so once a border exists it cannot be redrawn — the order is loose, the joins are permanent.
- One map, invented whole. No sheet is a picture on its own. Every road runs off the edge and continues on the next sheet, so the 9,801 are one fictional city — a place that exists nowhere and is mapped completely.
- One sheet, one recording. Every drawing has its own video, from blank paper to signature, unedited and uncut. Eight to sixteen hours. No sheet shares a recording with another.
- The paper is many, the map is one. Each sheet is sold, filmed and archived separately. Only the drawing continues across them — nothing else does.
Collect
The photograph, not the promise.
Paper first
Every collectible begins as a physical A4 sheet. The digital piece is a photograph of an object that already exists — never a render, never generated.
Sold one at a time
Each sheet is listed on its own the week it is finished. Nothing is bundled, nothing waits for a batch — a drawing is a complete object the moment the pen leaves the paper.
The recording travels with it
Every piece carries a permanent link to its own full recording. Owning the drawing means owning the proof of how long it took, hour by hour.
Stream
A channel that will never stop.
The channel runs continuously, playing finished recordings in sequence. It is not a live feed and never claims to be — every frame you see was recorded at a stated date, and its number and file hash sit in the corner of the screen the whole time. There is no editing, no time-lapse and no second take, so the channel is less a broadcast than a proof that runs by itself.
Schedule
- A recording
- One sheet, start to finish
- Length
- 8 – 16 hours
- Channel
- Recorded, played in sequence
- Sheets remaining
- 9,801
A sheet takes a working day and then some. At that rate the square is not a three-year project — it is a life-length one, and the arithmetic is published here rather than softened.
Why it isn't live
A sheet takes a working day, and pretending to broadcast that in real time would cost money the archive needs and prove nothing the recordings don't already prove. Calling it what it is costs nothing — and the overlay makes every frame checkable against the published hash.
Chapter III · undecided
Nine thousand sheets of paper have to go somewhere.
The physical edition is not designed yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise. The originals exist and are archived; what they become — a bound volume, a set of prints, a single wall-sized assembly of all 9,801 — is an open question. Tell me which one you would actually want, and the running tally will be published here.
Chapter releases only, unless you choose otherwise. No forwarding, no selling, unsubscribe in one click.
Transparency
The parts that are easy to hide.
Everything below is stated plainly because a project asking for years of attention should be checkable in minutes. Placeholder values shown here are replaced with live contract data at launch.
- Fee model
- Creator Fees — permanent
- Creator earnings
- 5.0%
- Collection size
- 9,801
- Chain
- Solana
- Contract
- —
- Pieces published
- 0 / 9,801
- Audit log
- Public
What the archive costs
Nine thousand eight hundred and one unbroken recordings are, by every ordinary measure, worthless data. Keeping them is the expense — and the expense is the point. It is published live here, in dollars, because a devotion you can measure is harder to fake than one you describe.
- Hours on camera
- —
- Archive size
- —
- Storage bill
- —
- At completion
- —
- Funded by
- Segregated archive fund
- 4K masters
- Held for exhibition
Risk disclosure
The token associated with this project is a high-risk speculative asset. Its value can go to zero.
Holding it is not ownership of any drawing, and confers no rights over the artwork or the project's output.
No return, yield or appreciation is promised. Nothing on this site is investment advice. You must be 18 or older.
Questions