Blaschke Ballet

The work and its context

Blaschke Ballet is a 600-edition Art Blocks Playground series by NumbersInMotion on the V2 core contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The official collection page places it in Art Blocks 500 / Playground and prints a fixed edition of 600 unique artworks.¹ Indexed project metadata retrieved on 18 September 2026 records project ID 167, slug blaschke-ballet-by-numbersinmotion, script type p5@1.0.0, license CC BY-NC 4.0, vertical name playground, heritage status ab500, website https://www.instagram.com/numbersinmotion/, and 600 of 600 invocations.² Atlas position 163 is an index number, not the contract project ID.

The stored project description is short. It calls the series a reflection on movement, color, and mathematics, "a juxtaposition of graceful motion and precise calculation," and invites the viewer to "observe the elegant ballerinas as they leap through the complex plane, the space between them constantly collapsing and reassembling."¹² Token features later retrieved from the index use French ballet vocabulary for those parameters: Rang, Ballet, Collant, Fluidite, Mouvement, and Ballerines.³

NumbersInMotion is the publishing name used on Art Blocks for this project. The official website field points at an Instagram profile rather than a long-form studio essay.² The AB5D dossier listed under Matt Jacobson is a bibliography lead for the artist identity. It is not treated here as a primary statement of Blaschke Ballet.⁴ This essay uses the on-chain description, the indexed script, and inspected outputs.

Conception and development

No dated standalone interview unique to Blaschke Ballet was attached to the assignment snapshot. The conception document that can be pinned to this slug is the project description stored on the collection page and in projects_metadata.description.¹² That text names three domains at once: movement, color, and mathematics. "Ballerinas" and "the complex plane" sit in the same sentence. The collapsing and reassembling space between them is an artist claim about the live drawing, not a measurement taken from a stopwatch session in this pass.

The title points at Wilhelm Blaschke, whose work on kinematic geometry and the geometry of motion is the conventional scholarly association for a Blaschke ballet of points in the plane. The project description does not cite a paper, a theorem, or a textbook. This essay therefore records the title as a named association and does not treat a specific Blaschke formula as verified source code until the script itself is read.³

Published traits encode repertoire rather than Euclidean labels. Ballet values in the sampled tokens include Le Lac des cygnes and Le Casse-Noisette. Rang values include Coryphee and Cambre. Ballerines counts appear as Dix, Vingt, and Trente. Those strings are index features. They tell a collector-facing story. They are not proof that the draw loop implements a named ballet step as a literal path.³

The Instagram account listed as website supplies artist context for NumbersInMotion. Individual posts were not treated as dated project briefs. The inspected profile header does not replace the Art Blocks description.⁵ Later AB5D prose that restates the ballet metaphor is treated as secondary.⁴

How the work was constructed

The indexed record reports script type and version p5@1.0.0.² The full script was retrieved on 18 September 2026 from projects_metadata.script on https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql, filtered by contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project_id "167". The UTF-8 payload is 7588 bytes. SHA-256 of those exact bytes is 86761eb678d782e9ae72ef5ac96cd7871d5af2b1657791bd3cbcc1d896b499fb. The script was read in full and was not executed in a local sandbox. The Art Blocks generator executes it in the browser when a live-view URL is loaded.³

The program is compact. Named functions in the body are pwa, setup, draw, and keyPressed. setup calls createCanvas with a WEBGL renderer. draw is present and there is no noLoop() in the inspected bytes, so the live generator is a continuous loop rather than a finite halt. keyPressed exists as an interaction hook. This essay does not claim a measured key-to-result mapping because the handler was read, not typed against a running generator.³

Hash consumption follows the Art Blocks tokenData.hash convention visible at the top of the body. Feature labels retrieved from tokens_metadata do not all appear as those exact French strings inside the minified program; they are index traits computed or assigned around the script. What is stored on chain is the project script plus each token hash. Rendering still requires a browser, p5 1.0.0, and the generator shell that injects tokenData. The project record marks the script locked. No Ethereum block was pinned.²³

No Tone.js, Web Audio, or other sound API appears in the inspected bytes. Claims about music would have to come from outside this program. None were found in the project description.¹³ The WEBGL path means a static PNG is a captured frame of a shader-like field, not a proof that motion has stopped.

The mint

Several clocks have to be kept apart. Token 167000000, invocation 0, was minted on 21 September 2021 at 00:26:41 and is currently owned by 0xf565d79c35758c752d3debfdd380d4eb16a3c6e3.³ The project record's activated_at is 28 September 2021 at 19:08:45. start_datetime is 30 September 2021 at 19:00:00.² Invocation 1 (token 167000001) was minted on 30 September 2021 at 19:01:13, seventy-three seconds after start. Invocations 10, 20 and 477 followed at 19:26:30, 19:29:37 and 19:34:47 the same day. completed_at is 30 September 2021 at 19:35:23.²³

Invocation 0 therefore predates activation by seven days and public start by nine. It is the natural candidate for an artist or administrative mint; contract event logs that would prove the minter role were not pulled. Public minting evidence in this sample begins with invocation 1, immediately after start_datetime. From start to completed_at is 35 minutes 23 seconds. That span covers the remaining 599 tokens only if no pause occurred and if start equaled purchaser availability. This essay does not convert that span into a sold-out-in-minutes claim.

Invocations and max_invocations both read 600 on 18 September 2026.² The collection page confirms the completed fixed edition.¹ No Dutch-auction schedule or opening ETH price was recovered from the collection page or the indexed project record.⁶ Current secondary listings are not historic increments. Who paid what for invocation 1 versus invocation 477 remains open.

Copyright and licensing

The project metadata field license is the exact string CC BY-NC 4.0. No separate link_to_license field was stored on the indexed record inspected for this essay.² The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International deed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ permits sharing and adaptation with attribution and forbids commercial use as defined in that deed.⁷ Whether the artist intended that standard deed or only the short label is not documented in a project-specific instrument beyond the Art Blocks field. The operative public text identified for the label is the 4.0 deed.

Artwork rights are separate from source-code rights. The artist script is visible through the index and generator. Visibility is not a license to copy, fork, or reissue the program. No SPDX identifier or copyright header was present in the inspected script body.³ p5.js 1.0.0 is a third-party runtime with its own license; the artwork CC label does not relicense that library.²

AB5D's CC0 grant covers this essay's original prose only. Token ownership by AB5D or anyone else does not transfer copyright in the images.

Close reading of examples

Four tokens from the assignment discovery set were confirmed on the V2 contract and inspected as media-proxy PNGs with linked generator URLs: invocations 0, 1, 10 and 20. Invocation 477, owned by 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045 on 18 September 2026, is the header object and is described with them.³⁸⁹ Live key tests of keyPressed were not performed; interaction is documented from the script handler, not from a timed generator session.³ The PNGs are single frames of a continuous WEBGL draw loop, not halt states.

Edition 0 (token 167000000) carries Rang=Coryphee, Ballet=Le Lac des cygnes, Collant=Raccourci, Fluidite=Adagio, Mouvement=Battement Fondu, Ballerines=Vingt. The PNG is a field of mint and black. Soft conical highlights meet at bright pinch points, like folded satin or a set of gradient singularities. Dark lobes occupy the lower right and a hook of black cuts the left. Twenty ballerines is a trait count, not a set of drawn figures with limbs. The still cannot show the collapsing space the description names.³¹⁰

Edition 1 (token 167000001) is the first mint after start: Rang=Cambre, Ballet=Le Casse-Noisette, Collant=Releve, Fluidite=Arabesque Allegro, Mouvement=Battement Developpe, Ballerines=Dix. The PNG is yellow-white with olive-black bands. Horizontal tubules pinch at paired singularities, stacked in three registers, with a bright lower field. Ten rather than twenty singularities is visible as a simpler count of pinch points compared with edition 0. Nutcracker versus Swan Lake is a trait label; both stills are gradient fields, not costume pictures.³¹⁰

Edition 10 (token 167000010) is Coryphee / Casse-Noisette / Soutenu / Allonge / Grand Battement / Trente. Edition 20 is Cambre / Lac des cygnes / Entrelace / Allonge / Battement Developpe / Dix. Header edition 477 is Coryphee / Casse-Noisette / Gargouillade / Allonge / Battement Jete / Dix. All five tokens exist on the stated contract. Their PNGs continue the same language of colored singularities rather than figurative dancers.³¹⁰

Canonical token URLs use the chain/contract/id pattern. Displayed edition numbers are invocations.

Significance and limitations

Blaschke Ballet is a locked Playground edition that dresses a plane of gradient singularities in ballet vocabulary. The stored brief asks the viewer to watch ballerinas leap through the complex plane. The inspected stills show pinch points and color fields. The script is a short p5 WEBGL loop with a keyPressed hook and no audio.¹³ The 35-minute window from start_datetime to completed_at is a pair of indexed clocks, not a reconstructed sales narrative.²

Limits of this account are specific. Live generator key tests were not performed in the submitted research. Invocation 0's minter role was not read from logs. Individual token prices were not recovered. The Instagram website field was not a substitute for a dated essay.⁵ Before publication, the coordinator refreshed the complete three-wallet AB5D linked-account set and checked the chosen token owner against it. The owner matched. The exact requests, returned identity and observation time are retained in the evidence record, separately from the earlier research snapshot. This is current indexed ownership evidence; it does not establish the acquisition date or historical custody of the work.²⁹

Unresolved questions - What ETH price did each sampled token pay at primary sale? - Who minted token 167000000 on 21 September 2021, and under what project role? - What does keyPressed actually change in a running generator? - Which Blaschke construction, if any, is implemented as arithmetic rather than as a title? - Do Dix, Vingt and Trente map one-to-one onto visible pinch-point counts in every output?