The art rebuild that didn't touch the contract. A timeline.
Phase 2 art was HTML+SVG. It rendered. It was correct. It was also flat — every citizen looked like a logo, not a person. The collection had locked metadata on-chain and 4040 holders. Nothing about the city could change. Except the art.
Three options: (1) ship as-is and lose, (2) regenerate from scratch and break trait rarity, (3) edit each citizen against a reference anchor and preserve trait distributions to the byte. We chose 3.
OpenAI gpt-image-1.5 medium via images.edit() with a per-civilization reference image. Each token gets a 75–150 word visual-noun prompt seeded from on-chain traits. 9 batches of ≈ 500 images. Batch API for the 50% discount.
Four 1/1s and 35 honoraries were hand-iterated. Vitalik got a tetrahedron crown. punk6529 got a voxel cube. Origin Signal is the founder myth. Patient Zero is the moment before collapse. Genesis Hex is the bracket. Final Signal is the one who turns out the lights.
All 4040 images pinned to Pinata IPFS. Image CID: bafybeifax6nks… Metadata CID: bafybeieqxqqqq… Both sealed.
One transaction. setBaseURI on 0xa79e73c9…4b5504. Zero metadata changes. Zero trait rewrites. Every rarity preserved exactly.
4040 citizens woke up. None of them moved. All of them changed face. The signal didn't die. It moved.
