Andradite

The work and its context

Andradite is a 222-edition Factory release by Eltono on the Art Blocks V2 core contract. The official collection page now labels it an Art Blocks 500 work in the Factory category, a fixed edition of 222 unique artworks, and dates the public release to 25 May 2021.¹ Indexed project metadata refreshed for this revision records project ID 71 on contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, 222 of 222 invocations, script type p5@1.0.0, vertical name factory, heritage status ab500, and a locked script.² Atlas position is not the project ID.

Eltono connects Andradite to his Modo7 protocol and experiments in concrete sculpture. Its flat angular masses and contrasting edge marks suggest solidity, while coloured gradients borrow a convention from mineral photography. This is an attributed account of the artist's stated reference, rather than a claim that the program simulates geological growth.¹³

The inspected images are square compositions with rounded gradient mats, overlapping dark or light polygonal masses, and contrasting diagonal accents. The light variation in #10 reverses the more common navy-and-white relationship. The script calls noLoop() in setup and contains no pointer or audio handler.⁴

Eltono's collection-page biography describes generative facade painting, public space as studio, and Processing used to test wall-painting protocols.¹ That biography is platform copy. The lab page is the project-specific source and is used below for conception.

Conception and development

On his project page, Eltono traces the system to Modo n.º7, used across murals, drawings, wooden constructions and sculpture. He describes exploring concrete forms in 2020 before developing the digital edition, whose two offset layers each contain six shapes. The computer work therefore extends an established material practice rather than originating its visual language from the token format.³

Those sentences are artist process writing attached to this exact title; the current page does not establish when every paragraph was written. They should not be overwritten by later interviews. A March 2022 Kaloh conversation records Eltono discovering NFTs in January 2021 and recognizing Art Blocks as a way to sell first and generate after, which he says he had wanted for gallery work.⁵ That interview mentions Andradite as an illustration. It does not replace the lab page.

The indexed sequence: invocation 0 (token 71000000) was minted on 20 May 2021 at 20:23:09 UTC, five days before activated_at of 25 May 2021 at 03:51:22 UTC.⁴² Invocation 1 was minted on 25 May 2021 at 19:01:37 UTC, which matches start_datetime and the lab page's "222 iterations were made ready to be generated on May 25th 2021 at 9h00 pm" in Paris time.³² completed_at is 26 June 2021 at 20:05:29 UTC. The lab page says the edition "sold out on June 26th 2021 at 10h05 pm (Paris Time)."³ Those two end stamps agree to the minute once timezone is applied (Paris 22:05 CEST is 20:05 UTC). The span from the first observed release-day mint to completion is approximately thirty-two days. This essay reports that span. It does not convert it into a one-day sellout.

How the work was constructed

The complete artist script was independently retrieved again through the Art Blocks index, filtered by this exact contract and project 71. Its 10,989 UTF-8 bytes produce SHA-256 c1a8d6488335842968dcc05553e182559d18717db70835dda5e61c62d79ec07d, matching the original submission. The declared runtime is p5 1.0.0. This is an indexed retrieval rather than an independently reconstructed, block-pinned chain read.²⁴

A seed parsed from the leading portion of the token hash initializes a custom xorshift generator. Successive values drive palette selection, shuffling and polygon choices. The geometry begins with three columns and two rows. Within each cell, the code walks around the perimeter, recording corners and intermediate edge positions. There are ten distinct positions, but fourteen stored entries because the corner at each transition between sides is recorded twice. This is a concrete implementation detail behind the artist's ten-point description, not evidence that the shipped work uses a different spatial grid.⁴

For each of two passes, the script visits all six cells. It shuffles the perimeter-index list, chooses a six- or seven-entry polygon size, collects one extra candidate, sorts the chosen indices into perimeter order, then uses the first six or seven entries as vertices of a closed shape. Because indices can refer to duplicated corner positions, an entry count should not be equated with a guaranteed number of distinct visible corners. Drawing these closed polygons in sequence makes their overlaps significant: a later shape can obscure part of an earlier one.⁴

The two passes use margin offsets of positive and negative 124 design units, scaled with the rest of the drawing to the viewport. Those shifts move the layers in both horizontal and vertical position. The result can resemble slabs arranged at different depths, although the program is making a two-dimensional drawing rather than rendering a three-dimensional sculpture. The highlighting routine tests consecutive vertices and draws a line only when both coordinates change, excluding horizontal and vertical edges. A contrasting diagonal is therefore a rule of construction, not a simulated light source.⁴

A weighted 73-entry colour table separates roles for the outer mat, internal ground, grid, shape fills and edge accents. Horizontal or vertical gradients are drawn as successive narrow strips using interpolated colours. Most dark shapes receive white accents; the light branch selects off-white shapes and dark accents, as edition #10 visibly demonstrates. Describing all edges as white would miss that deliberate reversal.⁴

The sketch calls noLoop() in setup, and draw has an additional completion guard. No pointer, keyboard or audio handler was found. Four original hosted renderers were viewed successfully during the revision, matching the four official still previews previously inspected. The code supports a static composition, not an animation concealed by those previews. The artist's phrase about interactive possibilities is best left as his description of the protocol's relationships; it does not establish viewer controls in this program. The drawing still depends on the host supplying p5 and token data.³⁴

The mint

Invocation 0 (token 71000000) was minted on 20 May 2021 at 20:23:09 UTC and is held by 0xdd6cc7f2091a2c12e9f32baacfe000aa5c41f6c4.⁴ activated_at is 25 May 2021 at 03:51:22 UTC.² Invocation 1 minted 25 May 2021 at 19:01:37 UTC. Invocation 10 minted at 19:04:50 UTC. Invocation 20 minted at 19:10:13 UTC.⁴ Additional held invocation 95 minted on 1 June 2021 at 03:33:23 UTC. Invocations 165 and 214 minted on 26 June 2021 at 19:23:05 and 20:03:50 UTC, minutes before completed_at 26 June 2021 at 20:05:29 UTC.⁴²

Edition 0 predates activation by five days. The minter role was not read from logs. Public minting evidence in this sample begins with invocation 1 on 25 May at 19:01:37 UTC, which is the lab page's 21:00 Paris window.³ Completion on 26 June is an artist-stated sellout as well as an index timestamp. Original ETH list price was still not recovered from a primary receipt. Current collection listings starting at 0.0300 ETH are 2026 secondary asks.¹

Invocations and max_invocations both read 222.¹²

Copyright and licensing

The indexed artwork label is CC BY-NC 4.0, and Eltono's own project page links that licence. The operative Creative Commons terms permit sharing and adaptation for noncommercial purposes subject to attribution, licence information and identification of modifications. AB5D's faithful, attributed noncommercial collection display can identify the artist, canonical token and licence together. Owning the token does not transfer copyright, and the licence is not restricted to token owners.²⁶³

The artist's program and its dependencies remain separate. No distinct software licence for the artist script was identified. The project declares p5 1.0.0, but a version-specific dependency licence artifact was not successfully recovered in this revision; that gap is retained rather than borrowing artwork permission for software. The artist's page also credits a mineral photograph to Rob Lavinsky under CC BY-SA 3.0. That credit belongs to the photograph, not to the generated images. No mineral photographs or protocol PDF are redistributed in this package.³

AB5D's CC0 grant covers this essay's original prose only. The source package preserves Grok's original contribution and separately records the independent Codex revision; neither attribution changes Eltono's rights in the artwork.

Close reading of examples

Four works were independently inspected as official previews and then in their original hosted renderers: #0, #1, #10 and #165. The first three contrast palette and construction within the early mint sequence. The last is the featured AB5D holding, selected after a fresh check of all three currently linked wallets and its current indexed owner. This is a purposeful sample rather than an estimate of the whole edition's distribution.⁴⁷

Edition #0 places a nearly continuous navy body inside a peach-to-lilac mat. The top silhouette alternates flat ledges, a rising slope and a pointed projection. Across its interior, thin white diagonals stop without enclosing complete shapes. Those partial boundaries make it difficult to decide where one slab ends and another begins. Small exposed areas of the yellow-to-mint ground carry a regular pale grid, giving the irregular silhouette a measured framework. The contrast is between a continuous mass and a lattice that survives only through gaps. It is this selective disclosure, rather than detailed modelling or shading, that makes the flat assembly feel heavy.⁸

Edition #1 retains dark shapes but shifts the surrounding mat toward mint and blue-grey. Its upper half forms a broad, almost uninterrupted wall. The lower-right area opens into a cluster of angular gaps and crossing white cuts, concentrating the sense of articulation there. A long diagonal rises from the lower left toward that cluster while the top remains largely silent. The unchanged family of ingredients produces a different balance of weight: #0 spreads its interruptions more widely, whereas #1 gathers them below and to one side. Metadata saying that two tokens share a palette category cannot describe that compositional difference.⁹

Edition #10 reverses the major value relationship. An off-white mass sits against a deep violet-to-burgundy mat, with subdued warm colour visible through its cutouts. Its diagonal accents are dark, including the long line ascending from the middle toward the upper-right portion of the mass. The drawing feels less like a dark cavity and more like a pale wall incised by narrow marks. Yet its ledges and diagonal cuts still disclose the same underlying procedure. This example demonstrates why the artist's general account of dark blocks and white edges must be read alongside the full output range: the script explicitly accommodates the inverse contrast.¹⁰

Edition #165, the featured holding, sets navy shapes against a mat that moves horizontally from muted pink toward pale green. A large angular white contour in the upper-right region resembles an incomplete roof or bent frame. Lower down, a separate long diagonal and triangular openings divide the body without dissolving its mass. The dark grid visible in those openings remains subordinate to the bright cuts. Compared with #1's broad blank upper region, #165 places a more legible angular figure within the body itself. These are visual interpretations of flat overlapping shapes, not claims that the token encodes a particular building.¹¹

At the refreshed ownership observation, #165 belonged to 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045, one of the complete three-wallet AB5D profile set. Editions #95 and #214 were also indexed at that address, but they are not this essay's header. The selected static image is accompanied by a link to its original renderer and canonical token.⁴⁷

Significance and limitations

Andradite translates a protocol across materials without pretending that each material behaves identically. Its concrete ancestry helps explain the heavy silhouettes, but the digital work produces depth through overlap, contrasting cuts and gradient presentation. The grid offers a rule against which departures can be seen. Repeated procedures establish a recognisable family while local selections determine whether a composition feels sealed, broken or internally articulated.⁴

The strongest documentation is unusually direct: Eltono supplies a project-specific account of the protocol, a public opening time, a completion time and an artwork licence link. The script corroborates the two-layer construction and static rendering. Its duplicated perimeter entries and contrasting light branch also show why code inspection can add precision beyond repeating the artist's summary. The resulting image can evoke a sculpture without being a picture of a modelled object.⁴³

Unresolved questions - What original ETH price was configured, and did it change during the mint window? - Which minter role created #0 before activation? - What separate software permission, if any, applies to the artist's script? - Which exact dependency licence artifact accompanied the historical p5 runtime?