This is not a tutorial from a company. These are notes from building circularsurrealism.com with Grok Build: four chains, more than four hundred works, twenty-seven collections, rooms that open on a phone, a ledger that listens to the chain, a hang that knows what you hold, Look that can survive a 6K still, a press for the prints, socials that update themselves, a domain I already owned, and a backup of the files. About eight weeks. Three hundred and ninety-six prompts. One conversation.
This is the free edition: the story, the turning points, and the lessons. The full written guide — every step, every prompt, every fix — is at the end, if you want it.
I am Slowfreeze. I have been an artist working with AI since 2022. Circular Surrealism is not a filter I put on an image. It is the world the work comes from — orbs, circles, knights, myth, identity, the infinite.
For years that work lived only on marketplaces: Transient Labs, Foundation, OpenSea, Objkt, Rodeo, Zora, Manifold, Networked.art, Mallow. Links. Tabs. A collector had to already know my name to find the whole of it.
I wanted a house. A museum for everything I have minted, in the language of Circular Surrealism. Not a Linktree. Not a grid that dies when you add video. One place I could keep changing by talking, looking, and sending a screenshot until it was right.
I am writing this for artists. Not only AI artists. Anyone with a body of work scattered across platforms who wants one place that is actually theirs. You do not need to become a developer. You do need to know your work. You do need to sit with the preview until it is true.
What Grok Build is
Grok Build is not “make me a website” and walk away.
You stay in one conversation. You talk. It builds. You get a live preview in the same chat. You say what is wrong. It changes the house. When a chapter is true, you publish, and the live URL updates.
If you treat it like a vending machine, you get a vending-machine site. If you stay with it the way you stay with a piece until it is finished, you get a house.
One site, one conversation
This matters more than any feature.
Circular Surrealism was built in one long thread. Every room, every caption, every “no, switch those two titles” sits on top of what was already true. A second, different website gets a new conversation. I would not risk the museum for a side experiment.
27 August: start from the work, not from a template
The first message was not “artist portfolio, dark mode, three pages.” It was the domain, the platforms, the work, and the history of what had sold.
Give it the real things. Wallets. Collection links. The marketplaces where the work actually lives. The one physical exhibition. Screenshots with arrows when a caption is on the wrong photograph.
It cannot invent your provenance. It can hang it.
More than four hundred works across twenty-seven collections. Mystic Knights from 2022. Based Knights and the sixteen animations. Mystic Orbs. The Tezos gallery. That inventory is the spine. Every room hangs from it.
A beautiful empty museum is still empty. Make the inventory first.
How I actually talk to it
I do not write tickets.
I say: the wall is too heavy for the homepage — leave the phrasing and the door, put the mosaic in its own room so the site does not crash. I say: Mystic Orbs, not Orbs. I send a screenshot with a red double arrow and say switch these two titles.
Specific. Visual. Final.
The simple jobs are how you start. The house only became a house when the jobs got harder — when I stopped saying “make a gallery” and started saying what the gallery had to know, and why.
The reason matters as much as the request. “So the website doesn’t crash” is a better instruction than any feature name.
2 September: the house opens
By 1 September the core rooms stood: the works, the collections, live marks on the cards, the Wall. On 2 September circularsurrealism.com — a name I already owned — pointed at the house. That is the day the visits start counting.
Grok Build does not sell you the name. You buy it where you buy domains, you publish first, and then you point the name at the app. After that, every publish updates your URL.
The thing I understood later: the domain, the live site and the files are three different things. The domain is yours if you renew it. The live house is the publish. The files are yours once they are exported to GitHub. The domain alone is not the website. The website alone is not your name.
2–3 September: when we lost the preview
I need to be honest here, because getting to this house was not a straight line.
After a session that added themes, the preview would not load. Then the editing workspace had been wiped. The live domain was still up. The place where I edited it was gone. It felt like the house had been pulled out from under the work.
We started rebuilding. The rebuild was missing things I had already fought for — sold marks, marketplace connections, whole sections. About five dollars of credits went into that before we changed the approach.
Then we understood the thing that would have saved us if we had known it on day one: do not create the house again from a blank chat. When the thread breaks, the published house is the source of truth. Point the builder at the live site, restore from it, and keep going.
It was still work. It was not starting from zero.
Later in the build the preview went blank again. That time it was one broken comma in a data file. One character. Not every blank screen is a disaster. Some are a comma.
The rooms, and why each one is there
A house needs rooms with jobs. If everything is on the homepage, nothing is.
The homepage is the door. Works is the archive. Collections is the families. Available is the shop floor — only what is listed right now. Activity is the ledger. You hold is the hang for a collector. The Salon is the hang. The Wall is the mark — every piece as a polaroid laid into the Circular Surrealism seal. Then About, Exhibitions, Process, The Years, Atlas, Reach, Contact, Articles. Later, Prints.
That is a lot of rooms on purpose. Activity is not Available. The Salon is not the Wall. The Years is not About. If two rooms do the same thing, one of them should go — and one did.
4 September: the part that updates itself
This is the difference between a brochure and a house.
I will not log in every Sunday to type that Mystic Orb #55 sold. So the house listens. It is tied to the studio wallets and the collections on four chains, and it asks the markets what is live and what settled. New sales show up. New mints show up.
The socials were harder than the chain. X, TikTok and Farcaster can update live. Instagram, Threads and Facebook would not give the numbers, so those are typed in by hand — twenty-two of the forty-six prompts I spent on counters were follower updates. The rule we kept: never print a fake zero. If a network hides a number, the house hides it too.
Said simply: the work is on chain, the profiles are public, the house listens, I keep making.
11 September: the Salon, and the 3D room we took out
Right after the Salon was built, we tried 3D: a small 3D room that opened when you entered a piece.
3D can be the right room for someone else. It was not the right room for this house. In the 3D version the images did not load with the light they need to shine and glow. If the still cannot glow, the room is lying about the work. I said leave it how it was before, and it went back the same day.
What I wanted was a gallery. Portraits standing as portals. Landscapes opening as rooms. Squares holding the circle. A hanging you scroll, the still sharp, the light intact. That is the Salon.
16–21 September: making it light
Once the rooms were true, the house was still heavy. A museum that dies on a phone is not a museum.
The cards were playing 4K. One card image was a thirty-one megabyte PNG sitting on a thumbnail. The Wall loaded the original files into cells about twelve pixels wide, and somewhere between ninety and a hundred and thirty tiles the phone would die. It was never the number of tiles. It was the size of the files.
So the cards got light loops and card-size stills, and the originals waited for the moment you open the piece. The Wall got tiny stamps. The hero always starts on a still, so the door is never a black rectangle.
Then the publish would not go through. The first try carried eighty-six videos, about 120 MB, and froze on Deploying. Light loops only for the heavy pieces — twenty-five files, about 34 MB — and it went through. Light is not only for the visitor. It is for the publish too.
And a small thing that changed how the whole house felt: when a tap feels dead, it is not always slow. Sometimes it is silent. A small orb now turns when you tap the menu, and a mark holds the frame while a piece is still arriving. Every tap feels like it landed.
19–23 September: You hold, Look, and the pyramid we removed
You hold had to work from a normal browser. Connect a wallet, read only, and see what you hold from this museum — titled with your ENS or Tezos name if the chain knows it.
This was the hardest stretch of the whole build: fourteen fix rounds in three active days. Phones worked. On a desk, MetaMask and Phantom said unexpected error. The answer was not to rebuild the phone. It was to give the extension its own small window and leave the phone path alone.
Look is the room I cared about most. Press Look on a still and you should be able to walk into it — a 6K file on a 6K screen. At first Look was zooming a 1600-pixel card and calling it closer. The catalog had to tell the truth first: open the real original, not the marketplace display.
Then we built a tile pyramid — a deep-zoom map that sends only the squares you pinch into. On paper it is how you survive a huge file. We built it. We published it. The tiles showed their edges and the piece looked cheaper than the still. So we took it out. Look is the original still. You wait for the work, then you enter it.
Twice in this build, something clever was built and then removed. Both times the earlier, simpler version was the true one. Saying no is part of a high-end site, even after you spent credits on it.
October: the refused publish, and the press
At the start of October, Publish refused the house for about a day. Nothing was wrong with the rooms. The framework underneath needed a security update before the publisher would take it. It was a reminder that a site is not only what you see.
Then the press. INPRNT accepted the studio, and from 12 to 23 October the house grew a Prints room: every print in one place, the editions and how many are left in each size. A print is the work leaving the screen with a size, a paper, and a price you can read before you leave the house.
What it took
About eight weeks, from the first prompt on 27 August to the prints in late October. Three hundred and ninety-six prompts in one conversation. The build ran on the $11-a-month X plan at the time, plus at least $75 in $5 credit packs. By the builder’s count the finished house is about 45,000 lines. About 18,900 of those lines are the program itself (rooms, wallets, live listings, styles), and the rest is the catalog and the writing the house holds.
When I asked the builder what the same site would cost to hire out, its estimate was about $90,000 to $160,000 for a studio building it by hand, and about $8,000 to $20,000 for a developer steering AI agents while I only approved. Those are estimates, not quotes. What I actually paid was the plan I was already paying for, plus the credit packs, so about $100 out of pocket. If you count all the weekly usage the plan includes, my own estimate of what the build used is around $400 to $500.
The time did not go where I expected. By the builder’s work, the live sales data and the catalog pages took the most. Several features needed as many fix rounds as first attempts. Budget for fixing, not only for building.
What I would tell myself on day one
Bring the wallets on day one.
Do not put the mosaic on the homepage.
When the preview lies, believe the live domain. Work on top of what is already live. Do not start again from nothing.
When a video does not play on the phone, that is not a small bug. That is the piece not being in the room.
When you are tired, do one pair of captions. Do not rebuild the house.
When a clever room makes the work look cheaper, take it out.
Export the files. Point the domain. Keep the same conversation.
The house is open
Grok Build is how an artist who does not want to become a developer still gets a museum that listens to the chain. You still have to know what is true. You still have to sit with the frame. You still have to say switch those two, and mean it.
The circle was always the world.