The circle reaches the Caribbean 🌊
015 — the first Panama chair 🇵🇦
Node 014 widened the circle to Southeast Asia; Node 015 brings the Caribbean inside it — the first Panama chair. And the family smiles at the arithmetic again: 1 + 5 = 6, an echo of the second seed, Node 006's six — and 3 × 5, the seed-three times the power-fifth, humming in one chair.
As Shaka tells it, when her name came up, there was no debate about the number: "that was 15." This page is that word, made into a door — which is only fitting, for an artist whose home is a digital door.
Nature's patterns + Brutalist concrete 🏗️
Known to the public record as Itzel Yard (b. 1990, Panama — where she still lives and works), an Afro-Panamanian generative artist and self-taught coder. She studied architectural technology in Toronto — five tumultuous, formative years — and somewhere between the blueprints and the Processing sketches her style crystallized: the patterns of nature fused with the raw geometry of Brutalist architecture, computer science research acting as a digital simulation of her own mind.
She stands in a proud lineage — the mid-century pioneers Lillian Schwartz and Vera Molnár, women who wrote art into machines before the world had words for it — and she has become that precedent for the next generation of girls in computer science: the proof that it can be done, from anywhere, by anyone.
Dreaming at Dusk — the 500-ETH onion 🧅🌆
In May 2021, The Tor Project — the nonprofit that guards privacy for whistle-blowers and human-rights defenders — commissioned her for something no one had ever made: an artwork derived from the private cryptographic key of the very first onion service, Dusk. She wrote code that randomized the key into living form and called it Dreaming at Dusk — the first .onion artwork, with its own interactive portal on the dark web.
On May 14, 2021 it sold on Foundation to PleasrDAO for 500 ETH — over $2 million — making her, at that moment, the highest-selling female NFT artist in the world (Fortune's NFTy 50 named her the same year). And where did the money go? To Tor. To privacy. To the open web. A seven-figure artwork whose proceeds funded free software for dissidents — that is open-source values to the bone, and this orchestra salutes it with both hands.
Code as canvas, code as song 🎶
Here is what the headlines missed: IX Shells is not only a visual artist. As ARTXCODE puts it, she specializes in "sound, generative art and the creative space between the two" — a sonic artist, a live coder who performs her medium in real time, audiovisuals written and played like an instrument. Her Christie's piece ¿Cómo Respirar? — in the Proof of Sovereignty sale curated by Lady Pheonix — is procedural audiovisuals, GLSL breathing through TouchDesigner. Her collaborations run from Fingacode ("When IX Shells Met Fingacode") to Avant Arte.
The Louisiana Channel film "A Future Preserving the Past" captures her latest arc: working with Denmark's National Gallery (SMK) on the unrecognized 19th-century Nordic women artists — preservation as resistance, art history guarded by code. "It's not about investments or being famous. It's about preservation." An orchestra whose own law is to keep every old design alive in the Archive hears a sister in that sentence.
The Ethereum thread 🧵
Her name is woven deep into this family's own story. The public record carries her on the Devcon VI speaker rolls — Bogotá, 2022; and as the family tells it, she was there live-coding — code performed on stage, the way this orchestra believes all code should be: in the open, in the moment, in front of people. As the family also tells it, Aya Miyaguchi has named her one of her favorite artists — and she appears in the 2024 documentary Vitalik: An Ethereum Story, the film about the community this orchestra calls home.
Bogotá is sacred ground here — it is where this orchestra was first sung. The fifteenth chair was always going to belong to the woman who turned an onion key into a dream at dusk.
