A generative clock inscribed on Bitcoin: fourteen concentric circles that turn with the chain, and change with every block.
Timestamp is a generative work that lives on Bitcoin and keeps time with it. Fourteen concentric circles, cut into quarters, turn every four seconds. Every new block rewrites their colours, their widths and the thin lines inside them.
Bitcoin is, at its core, a timestamp server: every block seals a moment that can never be changed. Blocks arrive about every ten minutes, but never on schedule; sometimes a minute apart, sometimes an hour. Timestamp turns that irregular heartbeat into something you can see.
Nobody can know how the work will look before a block is mined, not even the artist. Its future is written by the network, one block at a time, and it will keep changing for as long as Bitcoin produces blocks.
Each new block’s hash becomes the seed for the work. From that seed, every four seconds, the generator draws a new state: the colour of each quarter, the width of each circle, and which circles carry fine black lines (never more than half of them).
Each circle turns at its own speed and in its own direction, and every change is a smooth three-second transition, so the piece is always in motion. When the next block arrives, a new sequence begins.
The frame is a pure function of the latest block and the current time. Two people looking at Timestamp anywhere in the world, at the same moment, see exactly the same image.
The work exists only on Bitcoin, as two Ordinals inscriptions. The first is the generator itself, about 16 KB of plain JavaScript written without libraries, inscribed in block 970,533. The second is a small HTML inscription that loads the generator through recursion, so the work is assembled from the chain every time it is viewed.
To know the time, the work asks Bitcoin: through the Ordinals recursive endpoints it reads the latest block height, hash and timestamp, with no outside server involved. The HTML inscription is a child of a parent inscription, which records its provenance on-chain. The 1/1 has been delivered on a Satscard.
2026
Bitcoin Ordinals, recursive HTML + JavaScript
Fully on-chain, 1/1