I had been scrolling backwards through a man's timeline for a week.

Not for a reason. Not at first. I had been holding a Dragon since 2021 and I went looking for the beginning of it, the way you sometimes go looking for a photograph of a friend before you knew them. What I expected was juvenilia. Early code, rougher, recognisably him.

What I found were rugs. Or what I began thinking of as the rugs (he never called them that). A run of early experiments: long striations in ochre and rust and cobalt, packed to the edge of the frame, dense as a woven thing. Some read as carpet. Some read as loom. All of them read as touch... as if the file had a nap to it, as if you could run your palm across the screen and feel the direction of it. They sit in his timeline before anything anyone knows him for... unnamed, unlinked, the way experiments are posted when nobody is watching yet. I cannot give you a URL; I can give you the works themselves, below, which is the better citation anyway.

I looked at them for a long time. Then I went and looked at my Dragon again.

It was the same hand.

What I had found was not a hidden origin story so much as a continuity I had failed to recognise.

The received account of William Mapan runs like this. Dragons on fxhash in 2021, the collection that put him and the platform on the map. Anticyclone on Art Blocks in 2022, the career-definer, weather systems and flow fields, the work the institutions would eventually reach for. Then, in October 2023, a swerve: Sketchbook A, sixty-four childlike scrawls in crayon, apparently a rejection of everything that came before. A departure. His own gallery said it to his face, on camera, in the Verse Talks conversation before the Sketchbook B launch... "a serious departure from anything he's done before."

I no longer think that is the right reading.

Go back to the rugs and read forward and a different story assembles itself. What the rugs are doing is not weaving. It is density, repetition, rhythm, variation... the specific problems you solve when you are trying to make a digital surface feel like a physical one. They are an experiment in materiality before a subject has arrived to carry it. The dragon came later. The dragon mattered... the myth, the naming, the creature you were asked to befriend rather than merely own, none of that was packaging, and I have written elsewhere about how much of the collection's life is in it. But the dragon was carried by something that was already there.

He has said as much, repeatedly, to anyone who asked, for years. He told the Collectors Corner podcast, back in 2022, that Dragons began with him buying paper, scanning it, and putting it into the code. He talks about Anni and Josef Albers and about wanting to make textile out of digital media. He told Verse Talks he will fill an entire sketchbook before touching the computer, "building mental bridges" from the hand to the function library. At the Extension opening in London he put it as plainly as it can be put: "I code as I paint and I paint as I code. There's no barrier."

And, asked directly on Verse Talks whether the code or the pen comes first, he says the thing that should have told all of us where this was going:

The pen. Definitely. Most of the time it comes from the pen.

We mistook the changing subjects for the centre of the practice. Dragons, weather, distance, the palettes, the traits, the grids... they mattered, and they were his choices, which means they were also him. But beneath them, and more constant than any of them, was the hand. The sketchbook was the source. The algorithm was downstream of it.

So why did it take until 2023 for the sketchbook to become the work?

Listen to how he describes his own back catalogue (again to Verse Talks) and notice that he does not describe it by subject. He describes it by proposition:

All other series were made with a platform in mind, with a medium in mind, with something in mind. Oh, this is my first Art Blocks project. This is my first textured print project. Whatever the project, there was always a framework to work in.

Each release began with an external proposition: a platform, a format, a material challenge, a first of some kind. He chose those propositions, and they were productive... he credits the blockchain itself with forcing him to think in universes rather than images, and without the frameworks there is no Dragons, no Anticyclone, no Distance. But a proposition is a translation, and translation is the site of his stated, career-long anxiety... the refrain he returns to in interview after interview: when you move between mediums, information gets lost. He does not want to lose anything. The entire decade of bridge-building has one purpose: to carry himself across intact.

What Sketchbook A actually is (the thing that makes it neither a departure nor a rebellion but an arrival) is the first work that began before any proposition had been named:

Sketchbook was mine. Nobody saw it yet. It was nothing. So I had complete freedom to make it whatever I wanted to. Nobody was expecting me to do something. Nobody was about to be disappointed. Oh, it's not Anticyclone 2. It's not Solitude 2.

Not new. Unattended.

And with the proposition gone, look at what he takes away. No shaders. No tricks. No fancy composition... he is explicit that generative work makes complexity cheap, and that cheap complexity is where the simpler, truer thing goes to hide. I wanted to remove all this. Simple composition, complex execution. What is left is the mark.

Sketchbook A is not Mapan doing something else. It is Mapan finally not doing anything else.

There is a second removal, and it is the one that made people argue.

Sixty four works. But rather than mint them, he opened the algorithm to the public first. The algorithm was generated more than 1.5 million times. Behind that number were people exploring, rejecting, returning, comparing, and eventually choosing... the collectors selected their own final pieces out of that field, and the field itself, the sifting and the not-yet-choosing, became, briefly, the work.

The community argued about it. Was it a mint mechanic or a gimmick; whose authorship was it. The honest answer is the interesting one: he did not surrender authorship, he relocated part of the curatorial act. He determined the field (its range, its materials, the conditions under which a choice could be made) and allowed collectors to decide where within it the final works would be found. Distributed curation inside an authored space. His own account of why, given to nftnow at the time:

The connection I was looking for was about to happen at a much bigger scale than 64.

It is the same gesture as the removed framework, pointed outward instead of inward. The sketchbook... the private object, the thing an artist fills alone and shows to no one... was opened, and over a million times, someone stepped inside it.

You can see why the V&A wanted a page. Museums have long treated the artist's sketchbook as privileged evidence (the mind before the monument, the hand before the finished picture) and the V&A holds notebooks and preparatory works across five centuries, Leonardo's among them. Mapan made a generative sketchbook, and then allowed the public inside it.

Sketchbook B arrives eighteen months later and closes the door again.

He is very precise about the difference... it is in the Verse Talks conversation, and I have not seen anyone quote him on it, so:

Sketchbook A were like bridges for everyone to work on. And those bridges... no, it's my bridges. You can't work here.

A opened the hand outward. B closes it back around himself. B is where he stops injecting a general human presence into a digital environment and starts injecting a specific one... his own scribble, his own line direction, what he calls his energy. The preparation was monastic: he describes going roughly three months without touching a computer at all, then a year and a half of studio work, beginning with an exercise almost embarrassing in its simplicity (vertical lines, in crayon, hundreds of times) to find out what his own patterns were before he tried to write them down as functions. Vertical, then horizontal, then grids, then organic, structure to no structure, keeping the mark-making through all of it. Études, the 360 work companion series, is that process left deliberately visible... the preparatory stages that usually stay in the folder, released as work because, in his words, people are never aware of what it takes to reach the final algorithm.

And he set himself a test, which is the hardest piece of evidence for everything I have argued here. He took an output the algorithm had generated and reproduced it by hand, in crayon, to see whether anything had been lost in the crossing. His verdict, in his own words: "it matches like perfectly... you can't say if it's code or not." For him this was the point of the whole series... proof that he could "express on both mediums without having any constraints, the both mediums talk to each other and enhance each other."

A man checking whether anything was lost. Nothing was lost. The bridge holds. That was the entire project.

Which brings me back to the rugs, and to 2021, and to why any of this is mine to say.

I found NFTs and I found Dragons in the same season. It was the first generative work that took the breath out of me and I could not have told you why. I wrote about it, eventually (Where Art Meets Alchemy) and reading it back now I find I had written, without understanding it, that Mapan's scanned paper and hand-drawn elements soften the digital rigidity of code, creating a tactile intimacy very rare in generative art, and that the result feels less like machine output and more like something conjured by an ancient craftsperson.

I thought I was describing dragons.

I was describing the hand. I had been looking at it since 2021 and had not once named it correctly. This is a way of reading him, not the secret key to him... the subjects are not a disguise, and a practice this deliberate is not waiting for a collector to decode it. But once the rugs have shown you the hand with no subject in front of it, you cannot unsee it anywhere: not in the scales of a Dragon, not in the graphite of an Anticyclone, and least of all in a sixty-four-page sketchbook that turned out to be the first time he showed it plainly.

The institutions have arrived now. That is the occasion for writing this and it is the least interesting part of it. The Victoria and Albert Museum has acquired Sketchbook A #64; Arab Bank Switzerland has collected Sketchbook A #55, Sketchbook B #60, and three Études. These are confirmations, not discoveries, and they confirm something the work settled in October 2023 and something the rugs settled before that.

He was asked what happens after Sketchbook B. Whether there would be a C, a D, a Z.

It's much more personal. This is my way of life. Sketching, finding things, sketching with my son. Making a system out of it. It's the way I live. So the sketchbooks are just part of me. Market or not market.

There is the answer to the problem he could never solve... the one about releases being final, about code getting locked, about the iteration stopping. You do not fix permanence by refusing to release. You fix it by making the release a page rather than a monument. A page implies another page. The book stays open.

The pen comes first. It always did. It took me five years and a folder of rugs to see it.

Mapan's words throughout are drawn from four conversations: Verse Talks with the Verse team, recorded ahead of the Sketchbook B and Études release (April 2025); the panel at the opening of Extension, SOLOS/Verse, London, with Peter Bauman (Le Random) and Julia Greenway (Zabludowicz Collection); the Collectors Corner podcast's Dragons deep dive (December 2022); and an NFT Statistics podcast conversation on Anticyclone (2023). The "bigger scale than 64" line is from nftnow's The Rise of William Mapan (November 2023). Quotes from recorded interviews have been lightly edited from transcripts for readability, without altering meaning.

The early textile experiments reproduced above were posted to Mapan's X timeline prior to the release of Dragons (December 2021); they are shown here as found. My earlier writing on Dragons is at Where Art Meets Alchemy.

The Victoria and Albert Museum and Arab Bank Switzerland acquisitions are as announced by SOLOS (July 2026).

William Mapan's Sketchbook A and Sketchbook B were released through SOLOS on Verse. Sketchbook A #64 has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum.