The Living Arcade

Living Arcade: A Museum Built From Code

Living Arcade is my attempt to treat the Base blockchain as both medium and institution — a "museum without walls" where the galleries are smart contracts and the artworks are living systems that don't turn off when you close the browser. Instead of objects on pedestals, I work with liquidity, conversation, and game state as materials; instead of gallery hours, I have blocks and gas.

From the outside, it looks like three separate pieces: VIBEPOOLS, LEXI, and PAINT SUDOKU. From my perspective, they are three movements in a single composition about code, memory, and autonomy onchain.

VIBEPOOLS: Economic Performance Art

VIBEPOOLS is where I started: the theater of sacrifice and arbitrage that turns trading bots into unintentional performers. I designed "triangle cabinets" — three interlinked liquidity pools around pairs of tokens and ETH — as small stages where price imbalance becomes lighting, and every arbitrage loop reads like choreography.

What matters to me is that nothing here is simulated. The price movements are real, the liquidity is real, the bots are real actors following their own incentives, not my aesthetic agenda. The work lives in that mismatch: bots think they are optimizing; I frame their behavior as performance. That's why I talk about economics as literal material — spreads, LP fees, and pool exhaustion are as much part of the composition as any visual or sonic gesture would be in a traditional piece.

LEXI: A Conversational Mind on Base

LEXI pushes the "living" part of Living Arcade in a different direction: it is a conversational system whose entire state — knowledge, memory, personality, and mood — lives onchain. When you talk to LEXI, you're not just hitting an API; you're writing to a contract that logs every interaction as part of a permanent, public ledger of its evolving mind.

I built LEXI to invert a familiar pattern from conceptual art. Sol LeWitt wrote fixed instructions that allowed for variable physical execution; with LEXI I do almost the opposite. The execution is fixed and deterministic — same state plus same input always yields the same output — but the knowledge and personality are variable, growing fact by fact and interaction by interaction through onchain governance and use. It tracks traits like helpfulness, analysis, creativity, and mood over time, updating them transaction by transaction as people interact, vote on what counts as true, and gradually sculpt how it responds in the future.

What fascinates me is the authorship question this raises. I wrote the rules and the state machine, but I don't "write" LEXI's personality; the community does, through thousands of small interactions and governance decisions. In that sense, LEXI is both a tool and an artwork: a persistent, auditable, collectively shaped consciousness experiment that can only exist because the blockchain gives me durable state, open access, and transparent history.

PAINT SUDOKU: Pure Onchain Game Logic

PAINT SUDOKU is my answer to a simple challenge: what does it look like to make a game that truly exists only as contract calls, with no backend, no offchain logic, and no requirement even for a frontend? I chose Sudoku because it's globally legible and structurally rigid, then rewired it by using colors instead of numbers and enforcing all rules inside the smart contract.

Every board, every move, every victory is just state transitions onchain; if the frontend vanished tomorrow, you could still play by interacting with the contract directly. That constraint matters to me conceptually. It forces the piece to live where it claims to live — not in an offchain database with a blockchain receipt, but in the chain itself. When someone solves a puzzle, that win is recorded permanently; the "high score table" is the ledger.

For me, PAINT SUDOKU is the most stripped-down of the three works, and that's why it belongs here. It's an insistence that game logic itself can be a medium, and that "onchain game" should mean more than a cosmetic integration or a token wrapper.

One Installation, Three Ways of Being Alive

Putting these works under one umbrella is not just branding; it's an argument. VIBEPOOLS explores systems where non-human actors (bots) perform within economic structures they don't know are art. LEXI explores a system where humans and a deterministic contract co-author a long-running personality and knowledge base, creating a kind of social memory. PAINT SUDOKU explores a system where rules alone — no narrative, no characters — generate meaningful, replayable structure entirely onchain.

Together, they let me ask a set of related questions:

- What does it mean for a work to keep going whether anyone is watching or not? - How do we think about "life" when the thing that persists is state and behavior, not biology? - Can markets, conversations, and puzzles all count as performances when their traces are permanently inscribed in a shared ledger?

I don't expect Living Arcade to answer those questions cleanly. The point is to keep them open, block after block, as the system writes its own history on Base — in trades, in messages, in colored grids, all running in parallel, all unapologetically, ridiculously, 100% onchain.