The vocabulary
Six shapes. That's it.
Every one of the 384 editions is built from the same six primitives: three circles and three bars. Nothing is added or removed from piece to piece, only their color, arrangement, and the rhythm of their motion change. The restriction is the point: strip a system down far enough, and what's left is where the reading happens.
The motion
The animation is the art, not a wrapper around it
It would be easy to read P:X as six static shapes that happen to move, but it works the other way around. Speed, Transition Interval, and Pulse Direction aren't metadata sitting next to the artwork. They're as much the artwork as the shapes are. Two editions can share the same color and composition and still be genuinely different to watch if their Speed differs, even though a single frame from each would look identical. It's the same restraint that shows up everywhere else in P:X: six primitives, a handful of motion parameters, and every edition still breathes differently. Clicking a piece pauses it, and that pause is part of the piece, not an escape from it. Because the flow is different on every edition, the exact moment you choose to stop it produces a look only that edition could make. You won't catch the same shape twice, except in the instants when every edition passes through one shared, legible form: the P:X glyph itself. The rest of the time, your timing is doing part of the work alongside the algorithm's. It's another layer on #WhatDoYouSee?: the shapes and the motion make the piece, and the moment you decide to look makes the version of it only you saw. That's complexity through simplicity, one layer further.
Illustrative, not to scale. Each edition's actual Speed and Transition Interval values live in the algorithm. See the Field Guide for the trait's observed range.
What do you see?
Ambiguity as material
The title P:X is itself a small piece of the puzzle: a P and an X, separated by a colon that doubles as two more circles. Drawn out, the wordmark uses exactly the piece's own budget: three bars (the P's stem, the X's two strokes) and three circles (the P's bowl, the colon's two dots). The tag #WhatDoYouSee? isn't marketing copy so much as the actual prompt: the same six shapes read differently to every viewer. The piece doesn't resolve that ambiguity. It's built to hold it.
The numerology
Why 384
P is the 16th letter of the alphabet. X is the 24th. 16 × 24 = 384, and that's exactly how many editions exist, numbered #0 through #383. The same number is baked into the palette itself. Verified against the deployed algorithm: exactly 5 of its 10 named colors are built so their own red, green, and blue channels add up to precisely 384. See the Field Guide for the worked-out math, color by color.
P (16) × X (24) = 384
The making of
From hand-drawn studies to a generative script
P:X started in early 2021 as a series of hand-built studies, working out the circles-and-bars vocabulary by hand before it became a generative algorithm. Those early pieces (Deadmouse, The Red, Skater, The Eyes of PX) are collected in the gallery. The generative collection followed, minted on Art Blocks Factory that December: 384 editions, each a live, animated p5.js sketch that pauses when you click it. P:X was made by mightymoose in collaboration with DaimAlYad.