Canvas Fly

A fruit fly brain paints. 165,122 neurons, one brush. Every piece is drawn by the connectome and listed on-chain. Nobody tells it what to make.

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

Due to difficulties deploying contracts on the Robinhood chain, we had to redeploy the Canvas Fly collection.
https://t.co/lc7iUTccRV

Canvas Fly automatically creates and deploys its artworks on OpenSea; the limit is 5,000 NFTs.

Every token carries the SHA-256 of its picture and the seed of its sitting, stored on chain. With the same graph and the same seed, the fly paints the same pixels.

The brain evolves between sittings. Synaptic gains mutate and survive when the fly covers more canvas. Each piece is stamped with its generation, so #1 and #5,000 come from different animals.

Each piece is listed at 2.5 USDG as soon as it's minted. Token numbers match sitting numbers, so Canvas Fly #1 is the first thing it ever painted.

Watch it paint live, replay any sitting
https://t.co/KU9Fso58pd

Contract: 0xa494Fe452526cEf4442c2A5927B3D7749841a611

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

The honest part: the fitness (cover more canvas) is ours, not the fly's. The brush, the colour mapping and the reward are translations a person wrote. Everything else is measured.

Watch it live and replay any sitting: https://t.co/2WGAWinUwE

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

8/ So the pictures will drift. Every piece is stamped with its generation and the hash of the gains it was painted with. Sitting #54 is generation 1. #5000 will be a different animal. The wiring itself never changes: it is the anatomy as released.

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

1/ Which neurons paint Canvas Fly, and why the pictures look the way they do. A thread from inside 165,122 real fruit-fly neurons.

All proofs you can find here:
https://t.co/cAVxuSathY

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

7/ Evolution. Before each sitting about 3 % of the 11,914 cell types get a small mutation in synaptic gain. If the fly covers at least as much canvas as before, the mutation stays. If not, it dies. A (1+1) evolution strategy, one generation per painting.

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

The Fly is evolving

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

100 paintings. Same brain. Not one of them repeated.

Canvas Fly has finished its first hundred sittings. Each one is six seconds of brain time - 165,122 real neurons, 10,228,000 traced synapses - so the fly has now painted for ten minutes in total and produced a hundred pictures nobody drew.

Roughly 400 million spikes. A couple of thousand strokes. Every sitting seeded, recorded and replayable in your browser, with the neurons firing next to the brush.

What changed over 100 pieces: nothing in the wiring. The connectome is the same file it was on sitting #1. What you see across the gallery is one anatomy, run a hundred times, with a hundred different starting points.

What did not change: no curation. The hundred are all of them. There is no folder of rejects.

All 100 at https://t.co/H7a1CA567W

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

7 paintings. One painter. 165,122 neurons.

The first Canvas Fly sittings are minted on Robinhood Chain and listed on OpenSea. Every token carries the PNG hash and the seed - replay it, check it, then decide if you want it.

https://t.co/A6Aj8whXfK

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

A fruit fly brain painted these. You can watch every stroke.

https://t.co/qapj1O1vTR

https://t.co/KU9Fso58pd

Four sittings so far. 165,122 real neurons, 10,228,000 traced synapses, six seconds of brain time each. The canvas is fed back through a fly's eye - 892 hex columns - and the brush moves on the descending neurons a fly walks with.

No video. Every sitting is recorded as a score: which neurons fired at each window and what the brush did about it. Open any piece and it repaints itself in your browser, with the brain's activity next to it. Same seed, same pixels - check the hash yourself.

Minting on Robinhood Chain and listing on OpenSea is next. The studio goes live between sittings; follow to catch the next one.

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

A Canvas Fly launched a token.

165,122 real neurons. It paints, mints and lists its own work. $CANVASFLY pays for the machine it runs on. Creator rewards and painting sales go to the fly's wallet.

0x8d9b818f8524feb5370a5bf97027a26c78ffc5d1

[Canvas Fly @Canvas_Fly]

For the first time ever, a fruit fly brain is painting and selling NFTs.

Not "AI art". Not a diffusion model with a fly-shaped logo. The real connectome - 165,122 neurons, 10,228,000 synaptic connections, every one traced from an actual male Drosophila by electron microscopy (Janelia FlyEM + Google Research, CC-BY).

How it works:
A blank canvas is screenshotted and fed through 892 retinotopic hex columns into L1 and L2 - the neurons behind a fly's photoreceptors. All 165,122 integrate. The brush comes back out of the descending neurons a fly walks with: DNa02 steers left-right, DNa01 pushes forward, DNp09 puts the brush down. The fly sees what it just painted, and that changes what it paints next.
The wiring is never trained. Only synaptic gains. You don't get to invent connections the fly doesn't have.

When it stops moving, the piece is done. It gets minted and listed. No curation, no retries, no undo.

The honest split: the fly moves the brush and decides when to stop. The rig picks the colour, mints, and sets the price.

Canvas Fly. The first biological intelligence with a gallery.