# Calendart by steen & n-e-o ## Work and context Calendart #78 gathers rounded blocks into a loosely organised field on green. Lavender, pale blue, orange and muted pink shapes overlap, separated by fine white outlines. A pale blue frame surrounds the composition. Some blocks nearly disappear because their fill matches the ground; their outlines keep them present as empty-looking compartments. The result suggests a crowded schedule while withholding the information that would make it usable. This original output was inspected directly, and its current owner matches the freshly checked AB5D wallet set.[^S09][^S12] Calendart is a collaboration credited to steen & n-e-o. Its canonical Art Blocks identity is Ethereum project 125, with 365 outputs, in the Factory category. The official artist profile identifies steen as co-creator of both Calendart and Time Squared and lists n e o alongside steen. That corroborates the joint credit despite the collection page’s abbreviated byline in some locations.[^S01][^S03] The work converts a familiar interface into a composition of colour, size and overlap. It does not read appointments from a calendar or update with the current date. The title supplies a way of recognising the shapes, while the executable program constructs them from a token seed. The contrast between administrative usefulness and visual freedom is therefore built into the work’s basic operation.[^S02] ## Conception The artists’ project statement names virtual calendars as a source of stress and describes transforming the crowded events of everyday digital life into art. This is a specific, contemporary visual source: the block of time as it appears in an interface, rather than the clock face or a printed month with numbered days.[^S01] Removing labels changes that source substantially. There is no meeting title to prioritise, no reminder to acknowledge and no numerical duration to calculate. A long rectangle may still suggest a demanding commitment, but it can also become a bridge between adjacent patches of colour. The viewer can follow white boundaries through overlap without needing to resolve an actual conflict between appointments. This reading follows the visible abstraction; it does not claim that the series cures the stress described in the statement.[^S05][^S07] The program reinforces the calendar association through names such as events, createCalendarGrid and calEvent. Its density categories range from Quiet through The Usual and Busy to Jam Packed. Those names translate the language of a working day into a set of compositional conditions. Density becomes an expressive variable, not simply a greater quantity of identical marks.[^S02] The inspected sources do not provide a detailed account of how the two artists divided the work, tested prototypes or selected their final palettes. The shared credit is secure; individual responsibilities are not. Likewise, no particular software product or historical artist is assigned as a direct influence beyond the digital-calendar reference the artists themselves supply.[^S01][^S03] ## Construction The full artist script is 5,786 UTF-8 bytes and uses p5.js 1.0.0. It extracts an initial number from the beginning of the token hash and passes it into a small custom random-number class. The class updates its state with bitwise shifts and exclusive-or operations, then reduces the result to a decimal step used for bounded numbers and integers. This supplies the sequence that selects the palette, background, frame, density and individual rectangle parameters.[^S02] The drawing surface is a square whose side is the smaller window dimension. Frame width and corner radius derive from that size. The program first chooses from six principal palettes, with special Whiteout and Blackout alternatives selected through an additional condition. Each principal palette contains six colours. Two preliminary colour choices help determine the background and outer frame; the individual events receive further selections from the same palette.[^S02] Background and outline decisions interact. A dark-mode branch can replace the selected ground with a dark neutral, while the stroke colour changes according to the ground and other conditions. The frame can use a palette colour, white or no visible stroke. A frame described as Matching therefore need not match the background exactly: it belongs to the chosen palette. The distinction is visible in #78, where pale blue frames green.[^S02][^S09] Four density settings define square grids of seven, eight, ten or sixteen cells per side. Each setting also establishes a scale factor and stroke weight. Quiet uses the seven-by-seven grid; The Usual uses eight; Busy uses ten; Jam Packed uses sixteen. These are starting locations, not promises that every cell will remain visible as a separate rectangle. The entire field is scaled inward, leaving a substantial margin inside the frame.[^S02] For each grid location, the program chooses two integers that become horizontal and vertical offsets. The same offsets change width and height, so position and proportion are coupled. A rectangle can become a narrow pill, a squat block or an elongated upright. Its centre is displaced differently depending on whether width exceeds height. If the resulting dimensions are equal, the event is omitted. The grid is therefore altered through both displacement and selective absence.[^S02] That omission has an important consequence for counting. A sixteen-by-sixteen configuration begins with 256 candidate events, but should not be described as displaying exactly 256 visible blocks. Some are skipped, some share the ground colour, and later rectangles cover parts of earlier ones. The visible composition records drawing order as well as density. White boundaries make many overlaps readable, but do not restore every concealed shape.[^S02][^S05][^S06] All observed outputs are static. The draw routine ends with noLoop, which p5 documents as stopping repeated execution. A translucent branch contains a sine expression using elapsed milliseconds, but the value is sampled during drawing and the routine then stops. It is therefore not evidence of continuous pulsing. It may make translucent output appearance sensitive to timing during initial execution, an issue not measured here. The five inspected tokens report Solid opacity.[^S02][^S11] No date lookup, calendar service, audio routine, external image load or interaction handler appears in the inspected artist program. A feature string mentions rotation, but no active rotation operation was found in the drawing path. The code also has no resize handler. It constructs a square for the initial viewport; equivalent results across resize, browser engines and pixel densities were not empirically established.[^S02] The relationship between features and rendering requires one further qualification. The current index calls #0’s palette Energy and #10’s Coffee Shop. The observed colours correspond instead to the script tables named Coffee Shop and Energy respectively: #0 uses cream, navy, orange and red-orange, whereas #10 uses muted blue, mauve, charcoal and ochre. The mismatch is retained as a research finding. It is not corrected by silently renaming the token metadata or by describing colours that were not seen.[^S02][^S05][^S07] ## Mint and release The current index reports 365 invocations and a maximum of 365. Its first mint is dated 2 August 2021 at 20:44:17 UTC. The second mint and indexed start are 9 August at 14:35:04, while the collection page gives 9 August as the release date. Activation is recorded later, on 11 August at 22:25:10, and completion on 16 August at 16:12:54.[^S01] These fields do not form a simple account of one uninterrupted public sale. The interval from indexed start to completion is seven days, one hour, thirty-seven minutes and fifty seconds, but that is arithmetic between stored events, not proof that minting remained continuously open for that duration. The later activation field could reflect history that the snapshot does not explain. The first token’s purpose and any reserved allocations remain unresolved.[^S01] The current price field is 0.8 ETH. It is recorded as a present indexed value, without promoting it to a verified opening price, fixed mint price or auction endpoint. No inspected original announcement established the complete sale schedule. An accurate release account therefore keeps the observed dates, current configuration and missing historical terms separate.[^S01] Druid’s Art Blocks charity roundup, published on 9 September 2021, attributes $166,582 for Girls Who Code to Calendart. The article explains that its totals can represent artist-reported donations, funds set aside or calculations from pledges, with exchange rates and recipient arrangements introducing uncertainty. The figure is useful evidence of the project’s reported charitable context, but it is not presented here as an independently audited receipt or transaction total.[^S04] ## Rights and licensing The current project record reports CC BY-NC 4.0, with an empty separate licence-link field. The corresponding Creative Commons legal text permits noncommercial sharing and adaptation subject to attribution, a licence reference, marking changes and its other conditions. Ownership of a token does not by itself transfer copyright or turn that noncommercial permission into a general commercial licence.[^S01][^S10] The display basis for this essay is an attributed, unchanged original output in a noncommercial editorial context, linked to its canonical token and the licence terms. The record states the observed label and date; it does not claim that the label has remained unchanged since mint. No separate licence for redistributing the entire artist script was found.[^S02][^S10] The p5 dependency has separate terms. Its official copyright page identifies the library as licensed under GNU LGPL 2.1. That does not automatically license the collaborating artists’ code or the artwork. The research package includes the script’s digest and analysis, rather than redistributing the complete program.[^S13] ## Four outputs **Calendart #0** presents a dense block field on pale cream, bounded by a red-orange frame. Navy and dark grey forms punctuate yellow, orange and red-orange. Narrow pills alternate with wider rounded blocks, and several cream-filled events register mainly through their white edges. The Jam Packed density is visually persuasive: the centre resembles a tightly populated interface while the surrounding margin remains calm. Its palette-label discrepancy is the one described above.[^S05] **Calendart #1** is also Jam Packed, but the navy ground changes the effect of similar density. Pale cyan and grey blocks carry much of the composition, interrupted by red and medium blue. White contours are more conspicuous against the dark field, including outlines around shapes that otherwise merge into it. The surrounding blue frame contains a busy interior without repeating its strongest red accents. This output demonstrates how background contrast can change perceived crowding without a different density category.[^S06] **Calendart #10** is more spacious. A muted mauve ground supports pale blue, beige, charcoal and ochre rectangles, with a blue-grey frame. Larger upright blocks are easy to follow, and gaps interrupt the central stack. The Usual density leaves fewer candidate events than the preceding examples, but the overlapping forms still resist a clean row-by-row reading. Its visible colours align with the script’s Energy table although the current index names Coffee Shop.[^S07] **Calendart #20** uses a lavender ground, pinkish frame and larger areas of pale cyan. Green blocks supply sharper accents, with orange and muted pink appearing between them. The Busy field includes both broad rectangles and thin horizontal connectors. Some lavender-filled shapes seem hollow because they share the background colour. Compared with the held #78, which also reports Retro and Busy, the different ground and arrangement give the same palette a substantially different balance.[^S08][^S09] These early editions were selected for direct, reproducible comparison rather than for rarity or exhaustive coverage. None of the four demonstrates Whiteout, Blackout or Translucent opacity. Those branches are known from code, and should not be confused with visual observations from this sample.[^S02] ## Significance and open questions Calendart’s subject remains recognisable after its practical information has disappeared. Rounded rectangles retain the visual memory of events, but their variable proportions and overlapping layers invite a different kind of attention. One can trace a narrow interval through the composition or notice a block that is present only as a white boundary. The work makes an interface available for looking rather than operating.[^S05][^S08] Its compact program also shows how much variation can arise from a restricted vocabulary. A handful of palettes, four density settings, coupled size-and-position changes and drawing order produce distinct relations between crowding and space. The title and density labels carry the calendar metaphor, while the actual outputs test how far that metaphor can survive abstraction.[^S02] The metadata discrepancies are part of the preservation record, not a reason to disregard the work. Comparing the index, full program and original renderings prevents a feature label from replacing observation. The same discipline is needed for release history, where stored dates and a current price leave material questions unanswered.[^S01][^S02] Unresolved research questions: - How did steen and n-e-o divide development and select the final parameters? - Why do Energy and Coffee Shop labels differ between current metadata and observed/script colours for #0 and #10? - What explains the indexed start preceding the activation timestamp? - What were the original pricing, availability and reserve arrangements? - Which records reconcile the reported Girls Who Code contribution? - Was a separate artist-code licence issued, and how stable are translucent results across execution timing and browsers? [^S01]: Art Blocks / steen & n-e-o. [Calendart collection and indexed record](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/calendart-by-steen-and-n-e-o). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S02]: steen & n-e-o. [Calendart complete artist program](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S03]: Art Blocks / steen. [steen artist profile](https://www.artblocks.io/artists/steen-x-n-e-o). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S04]: Druid / The Link, Art Blocks. [Update: Charity on Chain: 23.5 Million in August](https://medium.com/the-link-art-blocks/update-charity-on-chain-23-5-million-in-august-b4876db65c77). Published 2021-09-09. Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S05]: steen & n-e-o. [Calendart #0](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/125000000). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S06]: steen & n-e-o. [Calendart #1](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/125000001). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S07]: steen & n-e-o. [Calendart #10](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/125000010). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S08]: steen & n-e-o. [Calendart #20](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/125000020). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S09]: steen & n-e-o. [Calendart #78](https://www.artblocks.io/token/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/125000078). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S10]: Creative Commons. [Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 legal code](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.en). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S11]: p5.js. [noLoop reference](https://p5js.org/reference/p5/noLoop/). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S12]: Art Blocks / AB5D. [AB5D current collector profile](https://www.artblocks.io/profile/ab5d). Accessed 2026-09-18. [^S13]: p5.js. [p5 copyright and acknowledgement](https://p5js.org/copyright/). Accessed 2026-09-18.