The work uses the original Anthropic Claude 1 tokenizer at the word level (excluding spaces) from: https://t.co/Zg4COAUJvr
The palette is heavily inspired by the colors of Claude Code. Semantically important words are pinned manually (such as “Claude” to its iconic orange) while the remaining token colors are assigned by a simulated-annealing optimizer scoring perceptual separation, Albers-inspired color interaction, warm/cool balance, and multi-token word distinction.
A new Claude launch felt like the right moment to share a work about #Claude’s first announcement.
“Introducing 1484 19223” is a 30 × 30 in. backlit lenticular light box from Lexicon 4178 44, a physical artwork series I created about tokenization in modern LLMs.
Viewed from different angles, the artwork shifts between the English words humans read and the token IDs Claude 1 processes: making tokenization visible as a physical process.
The colors are inspired by Claude Code’s color scheme, and the dark palette with LED backlighting evokes the glow of screens, terminals, and development environments where we now collaborate with AI.
Full series: https://t.co/eTXV7h7zZ9
@AnthropicAI@claudeai@ClaudeDevs
Some details: the piece uses the ChatGPT tokenizer on a word-level to get tokens, then maps those tokens into a custom color system before producing the lenticular frames.
It’s not generative AI art: the final image, layout, color decisions, and physical object come from custom software, manual curation, and lenticular prototyping.
I created Lexicon 4178 44, a physical artwork series that reveals the hidden tokenization process within modern LLMs.
The first work, “Introducing 16047 38 2898,” is a 7-flip, 30 × 30 in. lenticular artwork based on the 2022 announcement of ChatGPT by @OpenAI. Viewed from different angles, the artwork shifts between the English words and GPT-3.5 token IDs: making tokenization visible as a physical process rather than an invisible preprocessing step.
The piece is showing in the #CVPR2026 Art Gallery in Denver, CO (curated by @elluba) starting today.
@cvpr #CVPRArt