# Celestia Art Initiative x Seismic

<img src="https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HkgSMGbf1A.png" width="2000"/>

## Seismic powers unorthodox experiences
Seismic built an [AVS](https://docs.eigenlayer.xyz/eigenlayer/overview/key-terms) (closed beta) for multiparty ZK, a term used to describe the class of techniques that allow people to interact with each other's hidden states. Our AVS plugs into any chain to orchestrate computation around shielded storage.

Zooming out a bit- we're a cryptography company that believes our tech should be the least interesting part of an application. Rather than focusing on what's happening behind the scenes, we put our energy into exploring new sections of the dapp design space. Our pilot partners look for answers to unusual questions such as "what does fully on-chain dating look like?" or "what does it feel like to discover treasure in an on-chain world?".

In this way, we heavily align with the goals of Celestia's Art Initiative. We're excited to be a "paint brush" that works hand-in-hand with artists to create unorthodox user experiences.

## Creating richer interactions in the on-chain medium
What can we do with the Seismic paint brush? Let's consider the two primary relationships in on-chain art: user<>artist and user<>user. We've held three brainstorming sessions, two for user<>artist and one of user<>user. Below, we outline the best idea from each sit-down.

**user<>artist.** Having the user interact with an artist's hidden state creates the feeling of exploring an artist's inspiration. In this context, "inspiration" is literally the generative function produced by months of artist refinement. The previous generation of generative art allowed collectors to randomly poke an artist's inspiration and receive an NFT. Minting felt like a slot machine. We can do more. What if we could allow collectors to play the more active role of an explorer of the artist's inspiration? Ideas:
1. Inspiration as a landscape. Picture a 2D infinite grind with terrain. Some parts grassy, some barren, some mountainous. You, as the explorer, venture out into this terrain by minting artworks at every location. A barren plot might yield you an uninteresting piece while a mountainous plot yields a wild sight. Imagine this: you just minted 20 pieces along your path and they all look plain. Suddenly, you bump into a mountain range of 6 other-worldly pieces. It's as if you stumbled on an entirely new collection. It would be thrilling.
1. Inspiration as inheritance. The second coming of [Jack Butcher's VVChecks](https://checks.art/). Here, we ask, what if the merging rules weren't deterministic? Merging could instead act like reproduction- you don't know what you're going to get from each parent. It isn't random either since some properties like dark eyes or freckles must be dominant to create interesting inheritance. Creating child NFTs with biological inheritance from parents would lead to community problem solving- similar to scientists during the age of Darwin- and meaningful lineage- similar to how we study our ancestral trees.

**user<>user.** Now, for the second relationship. Having a user interact with another user's hidden state leads to collaborative art creation, with a surprise. Every user is an artist. Users can work in parallel without knowing what's going on in other parts of the canvas. These unknown regions may affect your regions in unexplainable ways. Idea:
1. Embracing Conway. Each user can inhabit a set region in an expansive canvas of concurrent instantiations of [Conway's Game of Life](https://playgameoflife.com/). You only see your region. Similar to real life, you don't know when or how external factors are going to affect your domain. The best you can do is embrace the externalities as they come and create something beautiful with them. Each canvas can be co-created this way for a one week period. The conclusion of this week prompts an unveiling of the entire progression of work, at which point people can see what mix of events led to seemingly supernatural events during the round.

These are three ideas. Of course, we are not creatives. We're humbled by the work we studied from the last few waves of on-chain art. We can only hope that our proposals above can spark conversations that yield seminal pieces in the next wave.

## A viable system for creating these interactions
Here's a brief rundown of how Seismic enables the above experiences. Let's start with the baseline: posting all information directly to the chain. This would render state fully transparent. What you can instead do is post blinded state, data that's either run through a cryptographic hash / encryption function. You store pre-images, the original data, on your machine so you can later transition on-chain blinded state using zero knowledge or homomorphic encryption.

This standard approach solves single party hiding. Most of the interesting design space, however, exists in multiparty scenarios. This is where Seismic's AVS comes in. Instead of storing the pre-image locally, you can send them to the AVS so it may interact on your behalf. Doing so allows the AVS to keep a clone of on-chain hidden state in-the-clear (not blinded).

The AVS can then allow others to interact with your hidden state when the right on-chain predicates are met: *"reveal the terrain at (x, y) when a user commits to minting at that location"*. Satisfying this predicate allows you to interact with shielded state: *"now that you've committed to minting, you can access the terrain and resulting art"*. The word "access" in this context refers to performing computation over the shielded state by posting state transitions to the target chain. Seismic orchestrates this for you.

All of these components come together to create a system where 1) users can interact with each other's hidden state, and 2) malicious operators can't break safety. For a more thorough rundown of the innerworkings of Seismic's construction, see [this blog post](https://seismicsystems.substack.com/p/the-technical-roadmap-to-shielded).