The best ideas arrive unannounced, in the margins of the day. Late nights at the laptop, the house quiet, the glow of the screen illuminating questions I couldn't let go:

How do humans and algorithms truly interact?

What does performance mean when the performers don't know they're performing?

What began as late-night speculation became obsession.

A thought crystallized into a plan.

The plan became code.

The code became smart contracts on testnet...soon, mainnet*.

And now, Living Arcade exists—not as a finished piece but as a living system, performing itself continuously on the Base blockchain.

This is how it works for me—the mind doesn't stop when the workday ends. The hours after everything else quiets down become space for building what's been percolating.

The Living Arcade transforms the Base blockchain into a museum without walls—a continuous performance space where autonomous trading bots become unwitting performers in an artwork that never closes.

Using smart contracts, liquidity pools, and economic incentives, the installation creates "triangle cabinets"—small stages that bots discover and activate through their relentless search for profit. Each trade is a gesture, each arbitrage a performance beat. The work will run 24/7, and will continue as long as its technological substrate persists.

What follows are my reflections on the strange beauty of algorithms, the withdrawal of human control, and what it means to make art with machines that don't know they're creating it.

My work draws deeply from systems art of the past—Hans Haacke's ecological pieces where he'd set up aquariums or condensation systems and let natural processes become the work. Sol LeWitt's instruction pieces where the artist designs rules but delegates execution. There's this beautiful moment of authorial withdrawal where you create the conditions and then step back to see what emerges.

I'm also indebted to institutional critique—Andrea Fraser, Michael Asher—artists who questioned the structures that frame art. But instead of critiquing the museum or gallery system, I'm working with the blockchain as institution. It's a radically different kind of exhibition space: permissionless, transparent, permanent, but also alien to most.

The Living Arcade operates in a live economic context. The "randomness" isn't a number generator; it's actual market forces, actual bots competing, actual unpredictability.

And there's something about durational performance art—Tehching Hsieh's one-year performances, Marina Abramović's work with endurance. But I'm pushing duration towards permanence, towards works that outlives the creator. The installation has no planned ending. It could run for decades or days yet what remains is the art concept.

I remember hearing about Rhea Myers' work—pieces like Is Art where she had smart contracts evaluating whether something qualified as art based on programmed criteria. It was playful but also profound: What does it mean to have code making aesthetic judgments? Who's the artist—the person who wrote the contract, or the contract itself?

But honestly, most early "crypto art" felt more like digital collectibles than art native to the medium. NFTs as proof of ownership for JPEGs—that's interesting for markets and scarcity, but it's not really about blockchain. It's using blockchain as a backend for traditional digital art.

What excited me at the onset was the possibility art could only exist onchain, originating onchain. Art where the blockchain isn't just a distribution mechanism but the actual medium. Where the properties of blockchain—transparency, immutability, autonomous execution, permissionless participation—shape the work fundamentally.

The Living Arcade came from asking:

What if the blockchain is the gallery?

What if smart contracts are the performers?

What if the audience includes non-human actors who don't know they're participating in art?

Economics, first and foremost. Not as metaphor but as literal material—price differentials, liquidity pools, arbitrage opportunities, token burns, deflationary pressure. The way you might sculpt with bronze or paint with oil, I'm working with live, onchain economics and seeing what forms emerge.

Smart contracts—these self-executing programs that can't be altered once deployed. They're like instructions that enforce themselves, rules that become actors.

Trading bots—algorithmic entities that scan the blockchain constantly, looking for profit. They're my performers, but they don't know they're performing. They think they're optimizing. That gap between their intention and my framing is where the art lives.

Time and duration. The piece runs continuously, never repeats exactly, accumulates history. The blockchain timestamp becomes part of the compositional structure.

And transparency itself as material. Everything is public, queryable, permanently documented. There's no backstage, no hidden mechanism. The work is radically legible—if you speak the language.

The core architecture is what I call "triangle cabinets" (a.k.a. Vibe Pools)—three interconnected liquidity pools forming a triangle. Let's say you create a cabinet with two meme tokens—call them TOKEN_A and TOKEN_B—plus ETH. You create three pools: A/B, A/ETH, B/ETH.

These pools are economic structures, but I think of them as small stages. The "lighting"—what makes a stage active—is the "spread," an artificial price differential. When prices are imbalanced across the three pools, bots can trade around the triangle and capture the difference. That's arbitrage.

When a bot discovers an active cabinet, it executes trades. Every trade is recorded onchain. Activity creates the vibes of the moment.

Onchain systems replace physical materials with economic ones—price movement, arbitrage, and transparency become my clay, canvas, and light.

I want people to sit with the strangeness of algorithmic performance—the idea that meaning can emerge from mechanical behavior, from optimization without aesthetic intention. These bots are completely utilitarian. They're profit-maximizing machines. And yet, in aggregate, in interaction, in the patterns they create, something else appears.

There's also something about withdrawal of the author/artist and distributed agency. I design the system, but I don't control the performance. Cabinet creators add their own stages, choosing which tokens to sacrifice, which strategies to employ. Bots decide whether to perform. Agency is distributed across human and non-human actors.

I'm hoping viewers grapple with how time behaves here—a work that never stops, that keeps writing its own history, a performance that documents itself and may even outlive me.

What does it mean to make art that operates at the scale of systems?

Art that operates autonomously for days, years, maybe decades?

And there's an economic question embedded throughout:

Can markets be aesthetic objects?

Can chaos create art?

Can speculation be an artistic medium?

We usually separate art and finance. But what if we collapse that distinction? What if the financial functionality isn't incidental but essential to the work?

I'm not sure I want people to come away with answers. I want them to sit in the questions.

The biggest conceptual challenge was the bot problem. For the work to succeed, bots need to discover the cabinets and trade them. But bots are sophisticated—they scan for profit opportunities constantly. If your spreads are too obvious, bots extract value immediately and move on. If spreads are too narrow, bots ignore them.

So there's this delicate calibration attempt: creating economic conditions that are profitable enough to attract bots, but structured in ways that generate interesting, extended performances rather than single transactions.

Technically, getting three-pool arbitrage designed reliably was complex. You're essentially creating a circular trade route where bots can buy in one pool, trade through the triangle, and end with more than they started.

The deeper challenge was preventing the bots from completely draining the pools on their first pass. Without proper allocation, a bot could extract 90% of the value in a single arbitrage cycle, leaving the cabinet dead. The solution required sophisticated price-weighted token distribution—calculating real-time USD values and ensuring each pool side had equal economic weight.

The sustainability question is complex. We have the treasury allocation and $<TBD> reserve designed to support ongoing life. As cabinets generate LP fees, those can be cycled back into the system through buybacks and treasury replenishment. But honestly, part of the work is accepting that it might not run forever. Economic sustainability is part of the performance—if the system can't sustain itself, that's a meaningful outcome too.

This artwork builds on themes I explored in my book Humanity's Ledger: The Trust Protocol, where I examined how blockchain technology intersects with human trust and societal structures. The Living Arcade extends that inquiry into practice—taking the philosophical questions about trust, decentralization, and algorithmic systems and manifesting them as a living artwork.

I'm interested in the conceptual and workflow implications of autonomous systems. How do you design systems that coordinate multiple agents—human creators, algorithmic traders, autonomous protocols—without central control?

There's something compelling about the idea of compositional systems—not composition in the musical sense, but in the software sense. Small, well-defined components that can be combined in unexpected ways. How do liquidity pools, trading bots, smart contracts, and economic incentives compose into something greater than their parts?

I'm also fascinated by the intersection of determinism and emergence. Smart contracts are perfectly deterministic—they execute exactly as programmed. But when you have multiple deterministic systems interacting (contracts, bots, markets), you get genuine emergence. Unpredictable outcomes from predictable rules. That's the conceptual territory I want to explore further.

*As of the date of this publication, The Living Arcade is deployed on the Base testnet blockchain. Current plans are underway to migrate to Base mainnet. Viewers can observe the installation in real-time through the website: https://livingarcade.art. Cabinet creation will be open for use once $<TBD> token launches, treasury, and mainnet deployment is complete & tested again. $<TDB> is a placeholder for the art token in order to minimize bad actors launching a fake token beforehand. The official token CA as well as all mainnet CAs for the art installation will be on the website post conversion.

🚨 <TBD> WILL NOT A SPECULATIVE TOKEN. DO NOT BUY FOR FINANCIAL GAIN. THE TOKEN EXISTS TO POWER THE ARTWORK.

Further information: livingarcade.art

The Living Arcade

A continuous performance art installation
On the Base blockchain
2025–?

Artist: Aaron Vick
Technical Infrastructure: Smart Contracts, Subgraph, Frontend Interface
Performers: Autonomous Trading Bots (various)
Medium: Blockchain transactions, economic systems, emergent behavior
Duration: Ongoing

Website: livingarcade.art
Email: info@livingarcade.art

RPC URL: https://sepolia.base.org

Block Explorer: https://sepolia.basescan.org

Chain Name: Base Sepolia

Native Currency: ETH

WETH: 0x4200000000000000000000000000000000000006

ArcadeFactory: 0xF9bdaF83C694B7DFd37c96CF9E1d206A564B855E

ArcadeTreasury: 0x15Ff0eeb59ed7e73e567F1367d49C9474F0a8B40

ArcadeFeeCollector: 0x21c371AEfcbD28ee13bc2DE2A733085204336339

ArcadeKeeper: 0x66e0F27bA744cC862C9bF7BC9c16967B9D7d1C47

OperatorNFT: 0x1037fEc0847521A635B9d4474127f6324E77eF00

Factory: 0x4752ba5DBc23f44D87826276BF6Fd6b1C372aD24

Router: 0x94cC0AaC535CCDB3C01d6787D6413C739ae12bc4

Position Manager: 0x27F971cb582BF9E50F397e4d29a5C7A34f11faA2

The best ideas arrive unannounced, in the margins of the day. Late nights at the laptop, the house quiet, the glow of the screen illuminating questions I couldn't let go:

How do humans and algorithms truly interact?

What does performance mean when the performers don't know they're performing?

What began as late-night speculation became obsession.

A thought crystallized into a plan.

The plan became code.

The code became smart contracts on testnet...soon, mainnet*.

And now, Living Arcade exists—not as a finished piece but as a living system, performing itself continuously on the Base blockchain.

This is how it works for me—the mind doesn't stop when the workday ends. The hours after everything else quiets down become space for building what's been percolating.

The Living Arcade transforms the Base blockchain into a museum without walls—a continuous performance space where autonomous trading bots become unwitting performers in an artwork that never closes.

Using smart contracts, liquidity pools, and economic incentives, the installation creates "triangle cabinets"—small stages that bots discover and activate through their relentless search for profit. Each trade is a gesture, each arbitrage a performance beat. The work will run 24/7, and will continue as long as its technological substrate persists.

What follows are my reflections on the strange beauty of algorithms, the withdrawal of human control, and what it means to make art with machines that don't know they're creating it.

My work draws deeply from systems art of the past—Hans Haacke's ecological pieces where he'd set up aquariums or condensation systems and let natural processes become the work. Sol LeWitt's instruction pieces where the artist designs rules but delegates execution. There's this beautiful moment of authorial withdrawal where you create the conditions and then step back to see what emerges.

I'm also indebted to institutional critique—Andrea Fraser, Michael Asher—artists who questioned the structures that frame art. But instead of critiquing the museum or gallery system, I'm working with the blockchain as institution. It's a radically different kind of exhibition space: permissionless, transparent, permanent, but also alien to most.

The Living Arcade operates in a live economic context. The "randomness" isn't a number generator; it's actual market forces, actual bots competing, actual unpredictability.

And there's something about durational performance art—Tehching Hsieh's one-year performances, Marina Abramović's work with endurance. But I'm pushing duration towards permanence, towards works that outlives the creator. The installation has no planned ending. It could run for decades or days yet what remains is the art concept.

I remember hearing about Rhea Myers' work—pieces like Is Art where she had smart contracts evaluating whether something qualified as art based on programmed criteria. It was playful but also profound: What does it mean to have code making aesthetic judgments? Who's the artist—the person who wrote the contract, or the contract itself?

But honestly, most early "crypto art" felt more like digital collectibles than art native to the medium. NFTs as proof of ownership for JPEGs—that's interesting for markets and scarcity, but it's not really about blockchain. It's using blockchain as a backend for traditional digital art.

What excited me at the onset was the possibility art could only exist onchain, originating onchain. Art where the blockchain isn't just a distribution mechanism but the actual medium. Where the properties of blockchain—transparency, immutability, autonomous execution, permissionless participation—shape the work fundamentally.

The Living Arcade came from asking:

What if the blockchain is the gallery?

What if smart contracts are the performers?

What if the audience includes non-human actors who don't know they're participating in art?

Economics, first and foremost. Not as metaphor but as literal material—price differentials, liquidity pools, arbitrage opportunities, token burns, deflationary pressure. The way you might sculpt with bronze or paint with oil, I'm working with live, onchain economics and seeing what forms emerge.

Smart contracts—these self-executing programs that can't be altered once deployed. They're like instructions that enforce themselves, rules that become actors.

Trading bots—algorithmic entities that scan the blockchain constantly, looking for profit. They're my performers, but they don't know they're performing. They think they're optimizing. That gap between their intention and my framing is where the art lives.

Time and duration. The piece runs continuously, never repeats exactly, accumulates history. The blockchain timestamp becomes part of the compositional structure.

And transparency itself as material. Everything is public, queryable, permanently documented. There's no backstage, no hidden mechanism. The work is radically legible—if you speak the language.

The core architecture is what I call "triangle cabinets" (a.k.a. Vibe Pools)—three interconnected liquidity pools forming a triangle. Let's say you create a cabinet with two meme tokens—call them TOKEN_A and TOKEN_B—plus ETH. You create three pools: A/B, A/ETH, B/ETH.

These pools are economic structures, but I think of them as small stages. The "lighting"—what makes a stage active—is the "spread," an artificial price differential. When prices are imbalanced across the three pools, bots can trade around the triangle and capture the difference. That's arbitrage.

When a bot discovers an active cabinet, it executes trades. Every trade is recorded onchain. Activity creates the vibes of the moment.

Onchain systems replace physical materials with economic ones—price movement, arbitrage, and transparency become my clay, canvas, and light.

I want people to sit with the strangeness of algorithmic performance—the idea that meaning can emerge from mechanical behavior, from optimization without aesthetic intention. These bots are completely utilitarian. They're profit-maximizing machines. And yet, in aggregate, in interaction, in the patterns they create, something else appears.

There's also something about withdrawal of the author/artist and distributed agency. I design the system, but I don't control the performance. Cabinet creators add their own stages, choosing which tokens to sacrifice, which strategies to employ. Bots decide whether to perform. Agency is distributed across human and non-human actors.

I'm hoping viewers grapple with how time behaves here—a work that never stops, that keeps writing its own history, a performance that documents itself and may even outlive me.

What does it mean to make art that operates at the scale of systems?

Art that operates autonomously for days, years, maybe decades?

And there's an economic question embedded throughout:

Can markets be aesthetic objects?

Can chaos create art?

Can speculation be an artistic medium?

We usually separate art and finance. But what if we collapse that distinction? What if the financial functionality isn't incidental but essential to the work?

I'm not sure I want people to come away with answers. I want them to sit in the questions.

The biggest conceptual challenge was the bot problem. For the work to succeed, bots need to discover the cabinets and trade them. But bots are sophisticated—they scan for profit opportunities constantly. If your spreads are too obvious, bots extract value immediately and move on. If spreads are too narrow, bots ignore them.

So there's this delicate calibration attempt: creating economic conditions that are profitable enough to attract bots, but structured in ways that generate interesting, extended performances rather than single transactions.

Technically, getting three-pool arbitrage designed reliably was complex. You're essentially creating a circular trade route where bots can buy in one pool, trade through the triangle, and end with more than they started.

The deeper challenge was preventing the bots from completely draining the pools on their first pass. Without proper allocation, a bot could extract 90% of the value in a single arbitrage cycle, leaving the cabinet dead. The solution required sophisticated price-weighted token distribution—calculating real-time USD values and ensuring each pool side had equal economic weight.

The sustainability question is complex. We have the treasury allocation and $<TBD> reserve designed to support ongoing life. As cabinets generate LP fees, those can be cycled back into the system through buybacks and treasury replenishment. But honestly, part of the work is accepting that it might not run forever. Economic sustainability is part of the performance—if the system can't sustain itself, that's a meaningful outcome too.

This artwork builds on themes I explored in my book Humanity's Ledger: The Trust Protocol, where I examined how blockchain technology intersects with human trust and societal structures. The Living Arcade extends that inquiry into practice—taking the philosophical questions about trust, decentralization, and algorithmic systems and manifesting them as a living artwork.

I'm interested in the conceptual and workflow implications of autonomous systems. How do you design systems that coordinate multiple agents—human creators, algorithmic traders, autonomous protocols—without central control?

There's something compelling about the idea of compositional systems—not composition in the musical sense, but in the software sense. Small, well-defined components that can be combined in unexpected ways. How do liquidity pools, trading bots, smart contracts, and economic incentives compose into something greater than their parts?

I'm also fascinated by the intersection of determinism and emergence. Smart contracts are perfectly deterministic—they execute exactly as programmed. But when you have multiple deterministic systems interacting (contracts, bots, markets), you get genuine emergence. Unpredictable outcomes from predictable rules. That's the conceptual territory I want to explore further.

*As of the date of this publication, The Living Arcade is deployed on the Base testnet blockchain. Current plans are underway to migrate to Base mainnet. Viewers can observe the installation in real-time through the website: https://livingarcade.art. Cabinet creation will be open for use once $<TBD> token launches, treasury, and mainnet deployment is complete & tested again. $<TDB> is a placeholder for the art token in order to minimize bad actors launching a fake token beforehand. The official token CA as well as all mainnet CAs for the art installation will be on the website post conversion.

🚨 <TBD> WILL NOT A SPECULATIVE TOKEN. DO NOT BUY FOR FINANCIAL GAIN. THE TOKEN EXISTS TO POWER THE ARTWORK.

Further information: livingarcade.art

The Living Arcade

A continuous performance art installation
On the Base blockchain
2025–?

Artist: Aaron Vick
Technical Infrastructure: Smart Contracts, Subgraph, Frontend Interface
Performers: Autonomous Trading Bots (various)
Medium: Blockchain transactions, economic systems, emergent behavior
Duration: Ongoing

Website: livingarcade.art
Email: info@livingarcade.art

RPC URL: https://sepolia.base.org

Block Explorer: https://sepolia.basescan.org

Chain Name: Base Sepolia

Native Currency: ETH

WETH: 0x4200000000000000000000000000000000000006

ArcadeFactory: 0xF9bdaF83C694B7DFd37c96CF9E1d206A564B855E

ArcadeTreasury: 0x15Ff0eeb59ed7e73e567F1367d49C9474F0a8B40

ArcadeFeeCollector: 0x21c371AEfcbD28ee13bc2DE2A733085204336339

ArcadeKeeper: 0x66e0F27bA744cC862C9bF7BC9c16967B9D7d1C47

OperatorNFT: 0x1037fEc0847521A635B9d4474127f6324E77eF00

Factory: 0x4752ba5DBc23f44D87826276BF6Fd6b1C372aD24

Router: 0x94cC0AaC535CCDB3C01d6787D6413C739ae12bc4

Position Manager: 0x27F971cb582BF9E50F397e4d29a5C7A34f11faA2