MATHS IS ART

And that is exactly what VEXANORMIE is. Your Normie, turned into living smoke and cosmos by hand-written math. No AI. No model. No prompt.

Same Normie, same settings, the identical piece every time, on any device, forever. That is the line between art you can prove you made and a photo run through a filter.

01What it is

VEXANORMIE turns any Normie into a piece of generative smoke and cosmos. A Normie is a 40 × 40 grid, 1,600 pixels; the engine reads them straight from the public Normies API and runs real math on them. Nothing is uploaded. Four steps, start to finish — tap each one:

1 · Your Normie1,600 pixels, on-chain 2 · Smoke, by mathsa deterministic sim 3 · Real cosmoswarped through NASA 4 · Your piecePNG or GIF, forever

02Smoke is made with maths, not AI

The smoke is a fluid simulation — a cellular automaton — running on the Normie's 40 × 40 grid. Each lit pixel becomes a heat source; heat rises, curls along a noise flow, cools into smoke, and disperses, the way hot air actually moves. It is arithmetic on a grid, run many times.

Deterministic, so it is provable. Every random value is seeded from the Normie's exact pixels — there is no true randomness. The same Normie always makes the same smoke, on any device. That is what makes a piece ownable, not a one-off filter.

What the artist controls: seven live dials — density, definition, smoke, energy, reshape, curl, speed. A fixed default reproduces the signature look; changing them explores around it.

Every frame is drawn and encoded by a GIF/PNG engine written from scratch, no libraries. Read the engine deep dive →

03The cosmos layer

Pick a date and VEXANORMIE pulls a real image from NASA — APOD (deep space) or EPIC (Earth from a million miles out). It does not lay the photo over your Normie. Your Normie becomes a lens that bends where the real cosmos gets sampled, so the face dissolves and only the warped universe survives. Same photo, a different Normie, a completely different piece.

Public domain only. APOD sometimes features photos owned by individual astrophotographers, so the tool filters those out — only public-domain NASA imagery ever enters a piece. Not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA.

04The Canvas Coming soon

This is the part that matters most to me. VEXANORMIE is not just a tool. It is a way to make something together, and to give it back.

The plan: a 20 × 20 grid of 400 cosmic pieces. 356 are mine, a life told in real NASA dates. The community earns the final 44, one for each year of a new chapter, through open submission and a community vote. The people literally complete the picture: it fills as a wall of sealed, mysterious frames, and the moment the 44th community piece locks in, the whole grid flips at once and resolves into a single cosmic masterpiece. Sealed until that instant, so no one sees it coming.

The makers get paid. The wallet that created each of the 44 community pieces is recorded, and on-chain royalties route back to that creator — not once, but every time the piece changes hands. Create together, get rewarded together. That is what it can mean for the ecosystem: proof that a community collection can put its artists first.

The mechanics, in short: cosmic (NASA) pieces only; wallet confirmation with no signing; two submissions per wallet; one vote per piece; the chosen collection intended for a blind mint on-chain. An intention, not a promise — see the disclaimer below.

05Why it can't be copied

• It is a system, not an image. Each piece is generated on demand. Copying an output does not give you the engine.
• It is tuned by hand. The look is a specific set of numbers found over many iterations. That tuning is the signature, and it is not published.
• A cosmic piece couples three moving things: your Normie, a specific live NASA image, and a date. A filter cannot reproduce that.

The mechanism is open, in the spirit of Normies (CC0) and NASA (open data); the tuning is mine. You can build a smoke engine — you cannot build this one without doing your own. The engine deep dive →  ·  the open-source GIF encoder →

06Credits

• Art and engine: SHILLS (x.com/shills_81).
• Base collection: Normies by Serc and Yigit Duman, 10,000 on-chain, CC0.
• Space data: NASA APOD and EPIC / DSCOVR, open APIs. Public-domain imagery only; copyrighted APOD filtered out. Not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA.

THE ENGINE, IN DEPTH

For the curious: how the simulation and the from-scratch GIF and PNG encoders actually work. No libraries anywhere.

01The simulation

The smoke is a grid-based fluid simulation, a cellular automaton, on the Normie's 40 × 40 grid.

• Fuel. Each lit pixel of the Normie is a heat source; unlit pixels are empty space.
• Two fields. A heat field and a smoke field. Heat is injected at the fuel pixels, rises, and advects along a curl-noise flow, so it moves the way hot air actually moves rather than straight up. As heat cools it feeds the smoke, which disperses on its own flow.
• Diffusion and turbulence. Each step blurs and displaces the fields slightly, so edges soften and the smoke curls instead of staying rigid.
• Time. Running the step function repeatedly advances the piece. A still is one warmed-up frame; a GIF is a sequence of them.
• Deterministic. Every random value comes from a seed derived from the Normie's exact pixels. There is no true randomness — the same Normie always yields the same piece.

02The GIF / PNG engine, from scratch

Nothing here uses a graphics library. The animated GIF is assembled byte by byte by a hand-written GIF89a encoder: a from-scratch LZW compressor, a custom palette, and every control block written by hand. The still PNG is encoded the same way, with a custom text chunk that carries the piece's metadata inside the file.

• 256 shades of grey. Most quick GIF exports quantize to a handful of tones and band. This encoder uses a full 256-grey palette, so the smoke and the cosmos keep smooth gradients.
• Loops that are real, not stitched. A cosmic piece is a true periodic loop: the motion is driven by a single phase that completes one full cycle and returns exactly to where it began, so the clip captures precisely one period and the last frame flows into the first — no crossfade, no reverse, no seam. Plain smoke never returns to its start, so it uses a short crossfade at the wrap. Either way it loops forever.

The encoder is open source: vexanormie-gif.js — a tiny, dependency-free greyscale GIF89a + PNG-metadata encoder you can drop into any project (MIT). The mechanism is open; the art tuning is not part of it.