Coalition

The work and its context

Coalition is project 420 on the Art Blocks contract 0x99a9b7c1116f9ceeb1652de04d5969cce509b069. The index records 37 invocations against a maximum of 37, the runtime p5@1.0.0, a square aspect ratio, the vertical "presents" and the licence CC BY-NC 4.0, linked to the Creative Commons deed ¹. The project's website field points not to a portfolio but to an essay on Medium ¹².

The premise is set out in the first line of the description: "Coalition contains just 36 geometric creations" ¹. Each token shows a single solid (a pyramid, a cube, a dodecahedron or a sphere) wrapped in a black-and-white or two-colour pattern, floating on a pale grey gradient. Some tokens add a coloured disc or star behind the solid, or a band of twelve graded stripes. Seen alone, each is a tidy geometric emblem. Laid out in a 6 by 6 grid in mint order, the 36 tokens become "a larger, single artwork, the titular Coalition" ¹.

The 37th token is the joke and the argument. The description states that "a 37th is available for purchase", that its buyer "will find only an error message", and that "the algorithm self-destructs after mint #35" ¹. Its render is a blank white square ¹.

Conception and development

Who Generative Artworks is

Generative Artworks is a duo. The Art Blocks artist text describes "an artist duo based in the NYC area" who found Art Blocks in February 2021 and released Empyrean in March 2021 and Enchiridion in June 2021 ³⁴. A September 2021 issue of the Painting with Blocks newsletter names them as Alex and Stephen, who met in college ⁵. In that interview they say they first wanted to print "1 of 1 of X t-shirts" of their art, found it too costly, and ran an Instagram bot that posted generative images daily before moving on chain ⁵. The same source says "Stephen is a musician, Alex was a musician and wanted to be an architect" ⁵. No source inspected gives their surnames.

The index lists eight earlier and later projects under the name ¹:

Two of these are collaborations. Neogen Space Monkeys set the street artist Dalek's Space Monkeys imagery inside the duo's algorithms ⁶. Reservation, a marching-squares drawing designed for pen plotting, was released "in collaboration with Plottables" ⁷. Coalition itself carries no creative credit or partner in the index ¹. It was, however, deployed from a different artist address (0xd1aa…19a0) from the one used for all the duo's other projects (0xecc6…2cdb) ¹. Etherscan identifies 0xd1aa…19a0 as a "PullSplit" payment-splitting contract created by the duo's usual address, 0xecc6…2cdb ⁸. So the change of address looks like a revenue split, not a new artist identity. Its recipients could not be read. Art Blocks has also filmed the duo for its "Behind the Code" series, in an episode on Democracity ⁹.

From Reservation to Coalition

The duo's Medium essay, dated 13 March 2023 (the day of the release), is the main statement. Its byline reads "Written in collaboration with Marc Blanc", and no source inspected identifies Blanc further ². The essay pairs Coalition with Reservation. Reservation "runs on a script capable of producing 1,000 iterations", but the duo cut its output to 50. That made the algorithm the artwork and each token a share of it ²⁷. Coalition turns the idea around: the 36 outputs are the artwork, and the script cannot make any more ².

The essay names two analog precedents. One is Donald Judd's 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum, a single work made of 100 separate boxes. The other is the Mexican surrealist Pedro Friedeberg, whose repeated forms it links to 36 Perritos ². The description closes with a Friedeberg line: "There can be no avant-garde because everything has been done" ¹. The essay ends by hoping the work might address "the problem of ownership" and the question of "what constitutes 'art'" in generative media ². It also describes the 37th token in advance: "One collector will purchase token #36. This collector will find a JavaScript error message" ².

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 22,753 bytes, SHA-256 27a507cc25cb7eff936775c48925f7985a98fdc673316bab240daad964ac5820. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

The central fact is that most of each token is set by its place in the grid, not by its hash. The program reads the last four digits of the token ID, turns the invocation into a row and column, and then derives the following from position alone ¹:

The hash decides the rest. It picks which of 25 two-colour palettes a coloured token uses and which way round the colours fall. It chooses whether a stripe band is flat or rises or dips in the middle, and whether the background element is a circle or a star. It picks the surface pattern from 17 texture functions, and then every detail within that pattern ¹. A second, fixed seed is shared by every token. It shuffles twelve colours onto the twelve background-element cells, so each colour appears exactly once across the grid, and it chooses one easing curve for every stripe band (code reading, confirmed by simulation below) ¹. The Medium essay explains where this shared randomness came from: the duo "took hashes from token #0" of Empyrean, Enchiridion and Democracity "and combined them" ². The seed in the script matches none of those three hashes on its own, nor their bitwise XOR or their sum (own computation from index hashes), so the method of combination is not recorded ¹.

The textures are drawn on a flat image and wrapped onto the 3D model in WEBGL. "Moo", for example, is the code's rounded-polygon pattern of blotches, like cowhide or terrazzo ¹.

To test these rules, this draft re-implemented the program's random generator and its draw order in Python, then ran it over all 36 token hashes. Shape, Shaded, Stripe and Background Element matched the published traits for every token. Shape Texture matched for 33 of 36 (see quirk 1) ¹.

Coalition is also interactive. Dragging with the mouse tilts the solid by up to 36 degrees on either axis. On release it eases back to its resting pose, more slowly the further it was pushed ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

1. Three texture labels are wrong. The renders of #19, #26 and #27 do not show the textures their traits name. #19 is labelled Concentrics but shows overlapping squares. #26 is labelled Zoom but shows a rhombus lattice. #27 is labelled Zigzag but shows bricks. The simulation gives Squares, Rhombus and Bricks for these three, which matches the images ¹. All three have star backgrounds. The star drawing uses one extra random draw that the circle does not. The labels for all five star tokens are what the texture choice would be if that draw were skipped, so the trait script seems to have missed it (inference from simulation). The true counts are therefore Bricks 6, Squares 2 and Rhombus 2, against published counts of 5, 1 and 1; Zoom and Zigzag have 2 each, not 3; and Concentrics has 1, not 2 ¹.
2. Two textures never appear. The pool holds 17 texture functions, but only 15 trait names exist. A checkerboard pattern and a noise-driven diagonal pattern are fully written, yet none of the 36 hashes selects them ¹.
3. The self-destruct. If the invocation is above 35, the setup routine throws an error before drawing anything. The error text is one of twelve quotations, picked with p5's unseeded random function, so it can change on every load (code reading) ¹. The list includes the Friedeberg line from the description, lines attributed to Warhol, Dalí, Picasso, Kusama, Hirst, Judd, Haring, Frank Lloyd Wright and Bjarke Ingels, a Tyler Hobbs sentence about withholding program output, and "MIND THE SCAMS!!!" credited to DALEK, the duo's Space Monkeys collaborator ¹⁶. The index gives #36 a single trait, "Art: False" ¹.
4. A grid that knows about its neighbours. The background gradient is not drawn per tile. Each tile draws its own slice of one gradient that runs from near-white at the grid's top left to mid-grey at its bottom right ¹. The stripe bands meet the tile edges at the same height whether flat, peaked or dipped, so the band runs unbroken across each row.
5. One easing curve for everyone. The stripe colours step through twelve shades along an easing curve chosen by the fixed shared seed. It comes out as a quadratic ease on every token, reversed for the lower row (code reading, confirmed by simulation) ¹.
6. Palettes mostly unused. Twenty-five colour pairs are defined, but only 8 cells can use one. At most 8 pairs can ever appear ¹.
7. Small slips that do nothing. Each shape draws a random number that is never used, a table of hash bytes is never read, and the circle-packing helper checks a variable outside its scope, so its early exit never fires (code reading) ¹. None of these stops a token rendering; #15, the one "Moo", draws correctly ¹.
8. Code names and trait names. The code's "square" shape is published as Cube, the dodecahedron as Dodecagon, and the dark outline as "Shaded" ¹.

The most coveted variants

With 36 working tokens, position matters more than rarity: a collector buys a fixed cell of one picture. Still, the traits single out a few tokens ¹.

#21, the only Peak. Of the 12 stripe tokens, 7 are Flat, 4 are Valley and one is Peak ¹. #21, a pale green brick sphere on a yellow disc, is shown at the top of this essay. Etherscan records its last sale at 0.6 ETH ¹⁰. That sale came the day after the mint, on 14 March 2023, when jabulon.eth bought #21 from 0xfsn.eth and #27 from travieso.eth in one OpenSea transaction for 1.29 ETH in total ¹¹.

#15, the only "Moo". The rounded-blotch texture appears once: mint-green shapes on plum, on a cube set in a crimson circle across the crimson-to-pink band ¹.

#28, the only Beziers. A sphere of looping purple curves on apricot, in one of the eight coloured cells ¹.

The mislabelled three. #19, #26 and #27 are interesting for a different reason: their metadata misdescribes them (quirk 1). #27 has the highest last sale of the image tokens checked for this draft, 0.69 ETH, paid in that same 14 March 2023 purchase ¹²¹¹.

#36, the error. The blank 37th token has its own market, and its history is odd. It was the last token bought in the auction, on 13 March 2023 at 17:21:23 UTC, by the address Etherscan labels 从今天起做个纸手.eth, which sent 0.67 ETH ¹³. Eighty-four minutes later that address transferred it, with no payment in the transaction, to the duo's own address 0xecc6…2cdb ¹⁴¹. On 22 March 2023 the duo's address sold it on OpenSea to p1cky.eth for 0.7875 WETH, and received 0.779625 WETH after fees ¹⁵. That is the last sale Etherscan records ¹⁶, and OpenSea's collection page lists it as the top sale ¹⁷. On the sources checked, the token that holds no image has sold for more than any token that does, and the artists themselves made that sale. Why the minter handed it to them is not recorded.

AB5D's token, #11. AB5D holds #11 in the wallet Etherscan labels ab500dao.eth ¹¹⁸. It sits at the right-hand end of the second row: a black-and-white cube with a dark outline, covered in black stars of varied points. Its last recorded sale is 0.222 ETH ¹⁸. That sale took place on OpenSea on 22 September 2025. The buyer's address passed the token to AB5D's wallet four minutes later ¹⁹¹. Of the price, 0.0111 ETH (5 per cent) went to the project's split contract, 0xd1aa…19a0 ¹⁹.

Holdings. At retrieval the 37 tokens were held by 31 addresses. The largest holding is three tokens, #21, #27 and #29, in the address Etherscan labels jabulon.eth ¹¹⁰¹². No source inspected ties that name to a person. At the mint, the largest buyer was 0x3e43…1796, which bought four tokens (#1, #4, #10 and #13) and had sold or moved all four by mid-April 2023 ¹. Nobody appears to be assembling the full 36. For a work whose title is the whole grid, how far apart the set sits is itself part of the piece.

The grid as one work

No single token shows Coalition whole, so this draft assembled the composite from all 36 media-proxy renders ¹.

The four quadrants of solids are crossed by a belt of stripes in the middle two rows, crimson to pink above and sky blue to purple below, which zigzags at #13, #17, #21, #22 and #23. Twelve discs and stars, each a different colour, form a diamond around the centre, and the outer ring is entirely black and white ¹.

It works as a quilt more than a mosaic: a symmetrical plan of zones, filled in by chance.

The mint

Token #0: an artist mint

The first token, #0, was minted on 7 February 2023 at 01:55:23 UTC, two days before the index records activation on 9 February ¹. The transaction shows who minted it and how. The duo's usual address, 0xecc6…2cdb, bought it through Art Blocks' fixed-price minter for 0.35 ETH and received it directly ²⁰¹. It was therefore the artists' own copy, not an early sale. No source explains the timing.

The artists kept #0 for 19 months. On 27 September 2024 the duo's address moved it to 0x361d…1d57 in one bulk transfer with an ENS name, eight Doodle Labs Gen Art tokens and two Plottables tokens, 13000000 and 17000001. In the index those numbers correspond to Reservation #0 and Happenstance I #1, projects 13 and 17 on the same contract ²¹¹. On 12 October 2024 that address sent the same group on to alexvault.eth, which holds #0 at retrieval ²²¹. The name matches Alex, one of the duo, but no source ties the address to him ⁵.

The public sale

The public sale opened on 13 March 2023 at 17:00 UTC ¹. The index price field reads 0 because the price lived on the minter, not the project ¹. All 36 public tokens were sold through MinterDAExpSettlementV1, Art Blocks' exponential Dutch auction with settlement ¹. On this minter the price falls along an exponential curve set by a half-life. Art Blocks' documentation says all collectors pay the same final price, "the price at which the last token sold", and those who paid more get the difference back ²³.

The on-chain record shows how it ran. The first public purchase came at 17:14:59, when the buyer of #1 sent 1.4 ETH ²⁴. The last, #36, came at 17:21:23, when its buyer sent 0.67 ETH ¹³. That is 36 tokens in under six and a half minutes ¹. The index lists 32 buyer addresses in the minter's receipts. Twenty-eight of them had net payments of exactly 0.57325 ETH per token after rebates. The other four show higher figures (0.61 to 0.84 ETH), which suggests they had not yet claimed their excess ¹. That points to a settlement price of about 0.573 ETH, and roughly 20.6 ETH raised from the 36 public tokens (own computation from index receipts). The auction's starting price and decay rate were not found. The existing AB5D essay left the price open ²⁵. The floor at retrieval was 0.59999 ETH, close to the settlement price ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹²⁶. On that licence the images may be shared and adapted for non-commercial purposes with attribution. Commercial use needs the artists' permission ²⁶. The script carries no separate code licence, and p5.js is loaded by the platform. The twelve quotations in the error list are attributed to their authors in the code and are not covered by the duo's licence ¹.

Significance and limitations

Coalition is a small work built on one strict idea. It flips long-form generative art, where the algorithm is the art and outputs are samples, into a fixed set where the program exists only to produce 36 predetermined cells ². The code bears this out more than the description suggests. Position fixes shape, outline, stripe, background element and whether colour is used at all. The hash only fills in the details, and a shared fixed seed arranges the colours across the whole grid ¹. The 37th token turns the limit into a scene. It sold for more than any image token, although the seller was the duo itself after the minter passed it back to them ¹⁴¹⁵.

The limitations are practical. The work exists fully only as a grid that no single owner holds, and the trait metadata misdescribes three of its 36 cells ¹.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What was the auction's starting price and half-life on 13 March 2023? The settlement price of about 0.573 ETH is inferred from the minter receipts in the index. The minter contract's configuration events on Etherscan, or Art Blocks' release announcement, should confirm it.
2. Why did the minter of #36 hand the error token to the artists 84 minutes after buying it, and was anything paid off chain? Relatedly, is alexvault.eth, the present holder of #0, the address of Alex of Generative Artworks?
3. Who is Marc Blanc, the essay's co-writer, and who receives payments from the split contract 0xd1aa…19a0?
4. Have the artists or Art Blocks noticed the three wrong Shape Texture labels (#19, #26, #27), and will the metadata be corrected? How exactly were the three earlier #0 hashes combined into the script's fixed seed?
5. Has anyone shown or printed the 36 as a single grid, and does an official composite image exist? The duo's X and Instagram accounts could not be read. The OpenSea figures and the quotations from the Medium essay and the Painting with Blocks interview came from automated WebFetch extraction and should be checked against the pages.

Bibliography