Corners

The work and its context

Corners is project 292 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 64 invocations against a maximum of 64, the runtime js@na (plain JavaScript, no library), a square aspect ratio, the licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed, and the creative credit "Code by Reinier Feijen" ¹. Its vertical is Playground; the curation field reads "factory" ¹. Art Blocks lists it as an Art Blocks 500 release in the Playground category, released on 8 April 2022 ².

The project text is a single line: "various corners 🌹 various colors 🌹 various directions" ¹. The artist's display note adds a suggestion: "I would suggest to display this work as a lightbox or as a mural" ¹. The same line of text heads the work's page on Rozendaal's own website, which links to a generator and gives each token its own page ³.

Each output is a still image made of three flat planes of colour. They meet at a single point, joined by one horizontal edge, one vertical edge and one diagonal edge at 45 degrees. Read as a drawing, it is the inside corner of a room or a box seen in oblique projection: one wall faces the viewer as a rectangle, and the other two surfaces recede along the diagonal. That reading is ours, but the title supports it.

Rozendaal (born 1980, Dutch-Brazilian, based in New York) is one of the first artists to use the website as an artwork ²⁴. Art Blocks notes that he also makes installations, tapestries, lenticulars and books, and has shown at the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney and the Stedelijk Museum ². Corners came two months after his first Art Blocks project, Non Either (8 February 2022), and after his own 1,000-piece edition Endless Nameless (August 2021), half of whose proceeds went to Rhizome ⁴.

Conception and development

Rozendaal does not write code himself. Replying to a question on his website, he described his coding knowledge as "Smaller than a pimple on a fruitfly" and credited Reinier Feijen, who "enjoys the process of solving visual puzzles" ⁵. In a 2013 conversation with Jürg Lehni he said the two met at art school and that "our roles are clear" ⁶. In a 2025 interview with Peter Bauman he recalled converting his early Flash works to JavaScript with Feijen, "every month", a few pieces at a time ⁷. The index credits Feijen with the code for Corners, as it does for Non Either ¹.

His stated method helps explain the work's economy. In a 2021 interview he said of his code-based works, "It's not video", adding, "I don't know any other medium where you're that flexible" ⁸. He has described his approach as using "the screen the way a painter uses a canvas" ⁹.

The program carries a build tag that reads as 14 March 2022 (code reading) ¹. The first token was minted by the artist's address on 29 March, two days before activation ¹¹⁰. No source links the following to Corners directly. After Non Either sold out in about a minute, Rozendaal told Metadibs, "I think we priced it a little bit too low" ¹¹. Corners was sold by Dutch auction. And his later on-chain series Rooms (2024), also coded by Feijen, returns to the same subject of building "perspective and depth" from minimal elements ¹²⁹.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single minified script of 1,828 bytes, SHA-256 d4c85be6c2a9d9738fa9fa89eb85b14863af807898420dacde1bb2a8d14ded55, retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full ¹. No code is reproduced here. To test the traits, the generator was ported to Python and run against all 64 token hashes. The port reproduces every published Color, Exact Center, Exact Corner and Orientation value (own computation) ¹.

The script seeds a xorshift generator from the first 32 hex digits of the hash and makes its draws in this order ¹:

1. Palette. With probability 1/7 it takes three of five fixed pastels (yellow, cyan, mint, lavender and pink), shuffled. Otherwise it picks a base colour from a list of seven entries: black (listed twice), green, sky blue, violet, a crimson pink and magenta. It then shuffles five tint strengths (75, 55, 40, 20 and 10 per cent of the base colour, mixed with white) and keeps the first three, one for each plane.
2. The corner point. With probability 0.05 the point sits at the exact centre. Otherwise its two coordinates are drawn up to a quarter of the canvas from the centre. A second 5 per cent draw forces the point onto the diagonal. A weighted table then sets the signs of the two coordinates.
3. The snap. If the two coordinates are within 0.02 of each other in size, the point is moved onto the diagonal (code reading).
4. Mirroring. Two coin tosses flip the whole drawing horizontally and vertically.

The drawing starts with a white square. The diagonal edge runs from the corner point at 45 degrees until it meets the edge of the canvas. The horizontal and vertical edges run to the opposite sides. The quarter bounded by the horizontal and vertical edges is the rectangle, the "wall" ¹.

The Wall Area ranges are our own computation from the port. The exact thresholds are not in the script, which has no feature logic; they lie between 22.2 and 22.8 per cent, and between 37.3 and 40.0 per cent ¹. In principle the rectangle can cover from 6.25 to 56.25 per cent of the canvas. The largest in the edition is #16, at 55.0 per cent, and the smallest is #33, at 9.8 per cent (own computation) ¹.

The work is static: it draws on load and on resize, with no animation, sound or interaction (code reading) ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

Each point below comes from a full read of the program and the Python port, tested against all 64 token records. Code-only points are marked.

1. Orientation ignores the corner point. The weighted sign table (three parts to one, two and one) decides where the corner point sits in relation to the diagonal. But the Orientation trait is set entirely by the two mirror flips at the end, so each direction has a flat 25 per cent chance. What the sign table does control is the size of the wall. When the point lies between the centre and the corner the diagonal points to, the diagonal is short and the wall is big. All 19 Large tokens have their corner point there (own computation) ¹.
2. Most exact corners come from the snap. The dedicated 5 per cent draw produced only five of the 17 Exact Corners. Five more are the Exact Centers. The other seven come from the rule that pulls near-diagonal points onto the diagonal. The snap copies one coordinate onto the other, sign included, so a point on the wrong side of an axis jumps across it to the mirror position (own computation) ¹.
3. The forced diagonal relies on the snap. When the 5 per cent draw forces a diagonal point, one of its two sign options actually puts the point on the opposite diagonal. Only the snap rule then brings it back. Four of the five forced tokens (#2, #11, #16 and #62) were rescued this way (code reading, confirmed by the port) ¹.
4. Black is never black. Black appears twice in the base list, which makes Grey the commonest colour. But every plane is mixed with white by at least 25 per cent, so the darkest possible grey is #404040. No plane in any token is the pure base colour or white. Two of the five tint strengths are drawn and thrown away in every token (code reading) ¹.
5. Shading without a light. The three tints are shuffled at random, so the wall is not consistently the lightest or darkest plane. Among the 58 single-colour tokens it is the darkest in 24, the middle tone in 19 and the lightest in 15 (own computation) ¹. The space reads as a room, but no single light source lights it.
6. Rules in the published data. No Multi token is an Exact Corner or an Exact Center. No Small token is an Exact Corner, although the program could produce one. All five Exact Centers are Medium, since a centred corner gives a wall of exactly a quarter of the canvas (own computation) ¹.
7. A scale call that does nothing. The resize routine scales the drawing context by the device pixel ratio and then sets the canvas width, which resets the context. The same pattern appears in Non Either. It is harmless, because the drawing sets its own transform. Edges are sealed with strokes half a device pixel wide (code reading) ¹.
8. The square inside the window. The white square and its planes are fitted to the shorter side of the window and centred. Nothing is painted outside the square, so on a non-square screen the margins show whatever lies behind the canvas (code reading; not tested in a live browser) ¹.
9. An unused version tag. The script declares a constant reading "20220314t" that nothing reads, like the "20211206c" tag in Non Either. The index also records the project as non-static, although the output never changes after it is drawn (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No collector guide to Corners was found. What follows rests on the trait counts and the index.

Exact Center (5 of 64). In #17, #24, #31, #41 and #50 the corner sits at the centre of the canvas. The wall is then exactly a quarter, and the diagonal runs into a corner of the canvas ¹. #41 and #50 are both Pink, the joint-rarest colour, which makes them the rarest trait pairing in the edition. They are also near mirror images: one faces Top Right and the other Top Left (own computation) ¹.

Exact Corner (17 of 64). Here the diagonal lands precisely in a corner of the canvas. #16 is also the Large extreme: its violet wall covers 55 per cent of the canvas ¹.

Multi (6 of 64). #1, #3, #15, #29, #59 and #61 use the fixed pastels, so each plane is a different hue ¹. #1 was the first token sold in the public auction, and its buyer paid 1 ETH, the highest mint price found ¹⁰.

Small walls. In the Small tokens the wall shrinks to a block near one edge and the receding planes dominate. #33 has the smallest wall, a mid-grey block covering just under a tenth of the canvas ¹.

The AB5D tokens. #13 is Blue, Medium and oriented Bottom Left: a strong sky-blue side plane beside a paler wall, with the corner close to the horizontal midline ¹. #51, shown at the top, is Magenta and Large. Etherscan labels both holders as ab500dao.eth and gives their last sales as 0.99 ETH (#13) and 0.88 ETH (#51), without dates ¹³. The index records their last transfers in September 2025 ¹.

Notable collectors

At retrieval the 64 tokens sat in 42 addresses. The largest held seven, and four more held four each ¹. No source consulted names those holders. AB5D holds #13 and #51 ¹¹³. Token 0, minted by the artist's address, was transferred out about an hour after the sale ended, on 8 April 2022 ¹¹⁰. No museum holding or exhibition of Corners was found. MoMA's "Light: Rafaël Rozendaal" (2024 to 2025) linked 25 works, including Non Either and Rooms, but not Corners ¹⁴. The website of his Museum Folkwang retrospective (2023) lists Non Either among its NFTs, but not Corners ¹⁵.

The mint

The sales notes set out the mechanism: "Dutch Auction ⏱ five minute intervals ⏱ 2 > 1 > 0.6 > 0.4 > 0.25 ETH" ¹. The charity note reads: "25% of proceeds above resting price will be donated to St. Jude Children's Hospital" ¹. The index records activation on 31 March 2022, a start time of 19:00:00 UTC on 8 April, and completion at 19:16:32 ¹.

Token 0 was minted on 29 March at 13:26:50 UTC by the artist's address (newrafael.eth on Etherscan), which paid 0.25 ETH, the resting price ¹⁰. In the public sale nobody bought at 2 ETH. #1 sold at 19:05:59 for 1 ETH. The next token, #2, was not minted until 19:14:57, and it paid 0.4 ETH. The remaining 61 were minted between 19:15:24 and 19:16:32 ¹¹⁰. Every other mint transaction sampled (#3, #13 and #51) paid 0.4 ETH, which matches the index price ¹⁰¹. The auction therefore cleared at 0.4 ETH, and the 0.6 ETH and 0.25 ETH steps went unused in the public sale.

In each sampled public mint the payment was split three ways: 10 per cent to one address, 22.5 per cent to a second, and 67.5 per cent to the artist's address ¹⁰. No source consulted identifies the first two addresses, and neither carries a public label ¹⁰.

If every public token except #1 paid 0.4 ETH, proceeds above the resting price come to 10.05 ETH, and 25 per cent of that is about 2.5 ETH (own computation). No record of the St. Jude donation was found.

At retrieval the lowest listing was 0.399 ETH, just below the mint price ¹. OpenSea showed a 7.5 per cent creator fee; its other figures came through garbled and are not used here ¹⁶.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with a link to the Creative Commons deed ¹¹⁷. The licence allows non-commercial sharing with attribution but no derivatives. That rules out commercial reproduction, and adapted versions, without the artist's permission. Rozendaal applies the same licence to Rooms ¹². The program carries no separate code licence.

This matters for the display note. A lightbox or mural made by a collector would be a reproduction, and possibly an adaptation, so it would need the artist's agreement ¹¹⁷. No authorised physical Corners was found. Rozendaal's physical series, including the Into Time lenticulars and the Abstract Browsing tapestries, are separate bodies of work ¹⁸. The renders in this essay come from the Art Blocks media proxy and are used for reference.

Significance and limitations

Corners is Rozendaal's most minimal Art Blocks work: three planes and a point, making a room out of a square. The program is only 1,828 bytes, yet it holds a small set of spatial rules. The corner's position sets the wall size. The mirror flips set the direction. A snapping rule makes clean, closed compositions far more common than their nominal 5 per cent. Its display note, a lightbox or a mural, imagines the work at architectural scale, which suits a picture of architecture ¹. Two months after Non Either sold out in a minute, it tried a Dutch auction and cleared at double Non Either's indexed price ¹¹¹.

Its limits are clear. No interview, review or exhibition record for Corners itself was found, the sales record is thin, and the Wall Area thresholds had to be inferred.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Was the St. Jude donation made, and for how much? The estimate here is about 2.5 ETH. Who are the two unlabelled addresses in the primary split? Is the 22.5 per cent address Feijen, a charity, or someone else?
2. Has Corners ever been shown as a lightbox or mural, as the display note proposes? Rozendaal's X posts from April 2022 (@newrafael) are a lead, but they could not be fetched. So is the Art Blocks announcement.
3. What are the exact Wall Area thresholds, and were the published traits computed off-chain by a feature script that is not in the project record?
4. The web-search allowance ran out during research. Sales history, notable trades, collector commentary and any video or podcast coverage of Corners were not searched fully. A YouTube video titled "NFT MURAL That Donates To St. Jude Children's Hospital" (The NFTYQ Show, per YouTube's oEmbed service) turned up in a charity search. It was not watched, and no link to Corners is established.
5. The quotations from Rozendaal's coding reply, Metadibs, Le Random and the Fellowship page came from automated WebFetch extraction and need checking against the pages.

Bibliography