Collecting the Algorithm: RIngers

Dmitri Cherniak is one of the most influential figures in contemporary generative art. Coming from a technical background, Cherniak turned his engineering skills into artistic creation by developing algorithms that produce unique visual works. His Art Blocks collection, Ringers (2021), has become one of the defining generative art projects of the NFT era.

Ringers has produced perhaps the single most recognizable generative artwork: Ringers #879, famously known as "The Goose." Although collections like Fidenza and Chromie Squiggles are arguably recognized more broadly, few single generative artworks have captured collector attention as much as The Goose. Its unique mix of emergence, lore, and secondary market activity give it a unique place within generative art on the blockchain.

In this editorial, we look into Dmitri Cherniak’s background, the historical roots of Ringers’ visual concept, key aspects of the collection to appreciate, and our own curatorial perspective at Curated.

Dmitri Cherniak (b. 1988) is a Canadian generative artist and technology founder who began his career as an engineer and then entrepreneur. He cofounded Chargehound, a technology startup backed by Y Combinator that automated management of credit card chargebacks. Cherniak served as CTO, and the company was acquired by PayPal in 2021. Throughout his career as a working CTO, Cherniak also pursued art, using code not only as a practical tool, but as a creative medium.

Cherniak's practice centers on writing code to generate art, treating automation as his artistic medium. Inspired by Larva Labs' Autoglyphs, he began embedding code directly on the blockchain to let collectors mint art generated live. Moving beyond single-output platforms like SuperRare, he wanted viewers to experience the entire system rather than individual pieces. Cherniak had been working on a generative art platform when Erick Calderon reached out about his new platform Art Blocks.

His major breakthrough came with Ringers (2021), a series of 1,000 generative artworks that explores all the ways a string can wrap around a set of pegs. It was released as an Art Blocks Curated collection in January 2021. While collectors at the time were only just discovering generative art as NFTs – Art Blocks itself had launched a couple of months prior – the response to Ringers was extraordinary. The project sold out in about 20 minutes on launch day, an astonishing pace that signaled how much interest was coalescing around this new art form and in particular with Dmitri’s work.

The immediate secondary market response was equally impressive. Within just three weeks of the release, over 640 ETH of Ringers sales had occurred on secondary marketplaces – roughly $1 million in value by late February 2021. This early surge was largely fueled by NFT collectors who saw Ringers as a landmark collection.

The launch of Ringers was a turning point for on-chain generative art, and it became one of the first generative NFT collections widely recognized outside of the crypto scene. It demonstrated the viability of the Art Blocks model and proved that a well-crafted algorithmic series could achieve both critical acclaim and market value. The project’s success paved the way for other generative artists to find recognition, like Tyler Hobbs with Fidenza later on that year.

Beyond Ringers, Cherniak’s broader body of work includes several other significant generative art projects:

Ringers explores a simple but powerful idea: how many ways can you wrap a looped string around pegs? While the concept seems fresh in NFTs, it has deep roots in art history:

Cherniak first saw this concept visually in the serpentine belt diagram from Aphex Twin’s "Selected Ambient Works 85-92" album cover. Later, Zach Lieberman's generative art experiments in 2017 introduced him explicitly to Hofmann’s influence. These historical references place Cherniak within a broader tradition of artistic innovation.

There’s quite a lot to appreciate about Ringers: the expression of simple rules leading to a wide range of outcomes, the artistic intent to have them viewed not as individual pieces, but as a grid, and the lore and emergence of Ringers #879.

The algorithm behind Ringers operates on a set of simple rules, illustrated below.

This process highlights the magic of generative art: from a simple set of rules emerges a diverse collection of outputs, many with designs even the artist didn’t anticipate. The collection's ability to offer diverse outputs while maintaining a cohesive visual identity is a hallmark of strong generative art, and Ringers is perhaps one of the best examples of this.

Ringers beautifully illustrates how an algorithm explores possibilities. Viewed as a grid, the collection reveals the algorithm's coherence and range, showcasing both order and randomness. Each arrangement of pegs and strings represents decisions made by the code, allowing viewers to visually track how the algorithm navigates through countless potential outcomes. The diversity and complexity of these visuals encourages viewers to appreciate generative art as an active, computational thinking process rather than passive visuals.

Viewing Ringers in grid form emphasizes Cherniak’s original intent — showcasing the entirety of the algorithm rather than individual outputs. This method allows collectors and enthusiasts to perceive patterns, spot anomalies, and appreciate the delicate balance between control and randomness.

We’ve created an interactive Ringers grid creator below:

The most celebrated artwork in the collection, Ringers #879 — nicknamed "The Goose"— happened entirely by chance, as the output seemingly formed a shape that resembles a goose. This was an entirely unintentional outcome of Cherniak’s algorithm.

The work captivated the Art Blocks community, and the nickname “The Goose” was popularized by collectors in Discord and on social media. It gave #879 a distinct identity within the collection — not just another numbered abstract, but the Goose.

The market history of Ringers #879 reflects its iconic status. Originally minted on January 31, 2021 by "TheCryptonite," it sold four days later to PixelPete for just 1.26 ETH. Later that year, Three Arrows Capital purchased it for 1,800 ETH (approximately $5.9 million), making it one of the highest-valued NFT art sales at the time. Following 3AC's financial collapse in 2022, their NFT collection was auctioned at Sotheby's in June 2023, with the headline art work being The Goose, which achieved a total of $6.2 million. Acquired by The 6529 Fund, the sale highlighted the cultural significance of generative art, sparking community celebrations, tribute artworks, and media attention, further cementing “The Goose” as a legendary piece of digital art history.

Ringers has gained notable recognition beyond the NFT community, particularly with the acquisition of Ringers #962 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This event marked a major turning point, cementing generative art’s significant place within contemporary art history.

LACMA’s inclusion of Ringers #962 reflects a broader institutional acknowledgment of blockchain-based art as culturally important. The museum also collaborated with Cherniak to create additional interpretations of Ringers #962, further solidifying its importance and providing exposure to generative art for museum-goers. This collaboration emphasizes generative art's growing role in mainstream art and institutional collections worldwide.

Our curation approach at Curated is guided by visual aesthetics and balance, algorithmic uniqueness, and emergence narratives within the Ringers collection — all while maintaining coherence in the visual grid for our collection.

In our curation, we've selected pieces that highlight the clean, balanced aesthetics at the heart of Ringers. These central works feature simple layouts of pegs and strings, showing how minimal, repeated forms can create striking visual harmony.

Ringers was perhaps the first Art Blocks collection in which emergence played a major factor in its reception. Emergence is tied in to the very fabric of its prompt that a simple concept of wrapping strings around pegs yields delightful outputs. Beyond the iconic “Goose” Ringer, a number of works in the collection have their own emergence narratives and lore, including a few in the Curated collection:

Ringers are instantly recognizable through their elegant simplicity: circular "pegs" and a single, continuous "string" winding through them. The minimalist palette, which is typically black and white, helps to accentuate the occasional vibrant pops of color or rare trait.

Our collection emphasizes these extraordinary examples, highlighting pieces whose uncommon characteristics highlight the edges of Cherniak’s generative algorithm.

Beyond the statistically rare traits, there are also a number of desirable community favorite traits, including Beige backgrounds and “Smol Boi” Ringers. Beige backgrounds are favored for their subtleness, and “Smol Bois” are smaller than normal Ringers and a highlight favorite trait of the artist.

Ringers starts with a simple concept constructed with code that leads to unexpected outcomes. It's an exploration of computer algorithms translated into visual outputs that help us better understand how machines think and the creative potential of code. Dmitri Cherniak’s ability to simplify complex systems into elegant visuals, along with his role in popularizing generative art on the blockchain, secures his position as a key figure in generative art, bridging historical traditions with modern innovation.