Grant Yun: SECTIONS Turns the 1785 Land Survey Into 1,300 Square Miles of Code
Grant Yun's first long form, fully onchain generative project turns the Public Land Survey grid into 1,300 interactive 1/1 sections and 12 Megacities, launching with Fellowship on November 18 and on view at NODE in Palo Alto on November 19.
In 1785 the young United States adopted the Public Land Survey System and began dividing the land west of the Ohio River into squares 1 mile on a side. Each section holds 640 acres, and the roads that followed the survey lines still run a mile apart across the Midwest. SECTIONS, the new project by Grant Yun with Fellowship, takes that grid as its subject. Fellowship calls it his first long form, fully onchain, generative and interactive project, and places it in a line of American painters, from Thomas Cole to Ed Ruscha, who used the landscape to ask what the country is.
Each output is a single section. The code lays out farmland, centre pivot fields and grain elevators, then street grids, towers and freeways, with interchanges named by type: cloverleaf, diamond, stack. Every work also lists figures converted from US federal data for the land it shows, from road distance and residents to energy use, water use and carbon. The sections can be explored from the keyboard: 1, 2 and Q switch views, W, A, S and D move, U, I and O give dash cam angles, and E turns the section to night.
Yun, born in San Jose in 1996 and based in Milwaukee, selected the 1,300 sections himself. Alongside them are 12 Megacities, each joining 9 contiguous sections into a single work 9 times the size of a standard piece. The grid has been with him for years. Fellowship, releasing its second project with him, is also revisiting his earlier series: Midwest, made while he lived in Wisconsin, Growing Up, and Squiggles, his study of the Chromie Squiggle.
SECTIONS launches on Wednesday, November 18, 2026 at 1:00 PM ET. The 1,300 sections are 1/1s minted on OpenSea, and the 12 Megacities sell in a 24 hour auction. On November 19, NODE in Palo Alto opens a Sections exhibition at 180 University Avenue, where visitors can switch between aerial and street views, day and night, line drawings and rendered scenes, and watch simulated traffic move along the section roads.
Sources
- SECTIONS, Fellowship
- Fellowship announces SECTIONS by Grant Yun, X, November 6, 2026
- SECTIONS release details, Fellowship on X
- Sections exhibition at NODE, Fellowship on X
- Sections at NODE, Palo Alto, November 19, Luma
- Megacities, Grant Yun on X
- SECTIONS controls, Grant Yun on X
- Thumbnail: a Megacity beside a standard section, courtesy Grant Yun