Dot Grid

Colour occupies a field of points

Small black dots mark a regular field. Over them, black-edged squares assemble into coloured clusters, sometimes branching, sometimes compact, sometimes nearly touching another colour. The unoccupied points remain visible between the clusters and inside their occasional holes. Dot Grid makes its organizing structure available to the eye even where that structure has not been filled.¹²

The thousand-work Art Blocks Factory collection is credited to TheElephantNL, the pseudonym of Dutch-based artist Collin Kasbergen.³⁴ Its official release date is September 22, 2021. The artist's short statement names Piet Mondrian as an inspiration and identifies an interest in colour theory.³ The artist dossier provides a wider point of entry; the present account concentrates on the series' actual construction and visible differences.

The dots are more than background texture. They establish an expectation that every coloured square occupies a possible position in a larger order. As the eye moves from one cluster to another, the empty intervals become measurable. This creates a tension between the regularity of the field and the uneven outlines of the groups. The image can suggest a game board or a plan, but neither reading supplies an actual rule for play or a building to reconstruct.

An acknowledged influence and an incomplete development record

The published statement is concise: Mondrian, colour theory and a general interest in colour. It does not identify a particular painting, describe prototypes or explain when the dotted ground entered the project.³ The artist website listed in the project record could not be reached during research because its hostname did not resolve. No substantive development interview was established. Those limits matter: a plausible story about the work's evolution would still be a story without evidence.

Mondrian offers a useful comparison without becoming a claimed template. In MoMA's transcript about Broadway Boogie Woogie, Ann Temkin describes coloured rectangles and squares composing horizontal and vertical lines. She explains how a physically still painting can suggest animation through its visual rhythms.⁵ That account helps distinguish actual movement from the movement of attention, which is important for Dot Grid's static outputs. It does not establish that this particular Mondrian painting was the artist's source.

Dot Grid's own distinction is visible in the sample. Colour appears in separate, irregular groups rather than only in long continuous bands. Black borders subdivide each group, while the dotted field persists around it. The result holds individual units and larger patches in balance. A viewer can read a cluster as one shape, then return to the small squares from which it is made.

The program supplies firmer evidence than an imagined development history. It explicitly chooses among four hue relationships and weights the resulting colour lists. Colour theory is therefore present as an operative set of instructions, not merely as a phrase in the description.⁶ The date and sequence of the decisions that produced those instructions remain unresolved.

A seeded grid and locally growing groups

The complete artist script retrieved from the official index contains 9,834 UTF-8 bytes and specifies p5@1.0.0. It was read in full and hashed. The exact contract and project number 115 were corroborated; the AB500 roster position is not the project ID. This was an indexed retrieval, not a historical chain extraction pinned to a block.⁶

A prefix of the token hash initializes a custom shift-and-XOR random generator. The generator returns values in thousandth-sized steps and supplies all the project's variable choices. The code does not call a noise field or load an external image. The initial grid has between ten and fifty columns, with the same number of rows. Its canvas is a square fitted to the smaller browser dimension.⁶

Grid density affects several properties together. As the number of columns increases, the nominal number of groups rises from five to thirty, and the nominal block count per group rises from five to forty. These values are mapped continuously and then used as loop limits, so intermediate values are not always integers. The drawing's complexity grows through both a finer lattice and more attempts to place coloured units.⁶

An inset margin keeps the main grid away from the canvas edges. The dot positions are evenly mapped between those margins. Each coloured square is centred on a grid position and has a width calculated from the available span divided by the column count. Dot spacing uses one fewer interval, so square size and centre-to-centre spacing are not identical. Black strokes reinforce the divisions and can visually bridge the narrow spaces between adjacent squares.⁶

The palette choice selects complementary, split-complementary, triadic or tetradic relationships. A base hue is chosen between zero and 360 degrees. The additional hues are offset by 180 degrees for the complementary case; 170 and 190 for split complements; 120 and 240 for the triad; and successive ninety-degree steps for the tetrad. Within each hue family, the script varies saturation while keeping brightness at its maximum.⁶

Those colours are not equally represented in the selection array. The base hue and its saturation variants receive the largest share of entries. Secondary families receive smaller shares, with the exact allocation depending on the relationship. A group selects one array entry and uses that colour for all its blocks. This explains why several nearby groups can share a hue while differing in intensity, and why a large patch of one family can coexist with a small contrasting accent.⁶

Each group begins at a random grid position. It then considers the eight neighbouring positions around its existing blocks, including diagonals, and chooses among available candidates. Candidates outside the field or already occupied by earlier completed groups are excluded. Crucially, the growing group is not yet in the completed-group list, so it can revisit positions within itself. Its first square is also placed without an occupancy check. The process therefore does not guarantee disjoint groups or a fixed number of distinct coloured cells.⁶

The candidate list can contain repeated positions reached from different blocks. Selection operates on that list, not a deduplicated outline. A cluster's shape is consequently influenced by its own accumulated paths as well as by the boundaries established by previous groups. The apparent simplicity of a blocky silhouette conceals a slightly untidy growth process.⁶

The dots are drawn first and the coloured groups afterward, covering selected points. All drawing occurs during setup; the draw function is empty. The artist script contains no pointer handlers, keyboard controls, animation logic or audio. The held original remained unchanged across observations about thirty-five seconds apart, consistent with that static construction. There is no programmed moving phase for an archive to preserve or invent.⁶²

An August token before a September release

The current index records one thousand invocations and a maximum of one thousand. Edition zero was minted on August 12, 2021 at 21:06:11 UTC. Activation is recorded on September 21 at 17:28:44 UTC, while the official collection gives September 22 as the release date. These records should remain distinct.⁶³

All thousand indexed mint records were inspected. One belongs to August 12 and the other 999 to September 22. Edition one is timestamped 16:05:18 UTC on the latter day; edition 999 completed the edition at 17:20:17 UTC. The observed interval is one hour, fourteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds. Without an inspected original public-opening announcement, that interval is a mint-record span rather than a verified advertised sellout duration.⁶

Edition one's historical transaction minted a single token with a value of 1.5 ETH. The final transaction minted a single token for 0.1 ETH. Network fees were charged separately.⁷⁸ These purchases establish different prices at the beginning and end of the main mint, but they do not by themselves establish every price step, its timing or an announced resting price. The current sales-note field is empty, and the original cap-setting and early-allocation history were not recovered.⁶

An October 30, 2021 Art Blocks newsletter reports $72,360 for Creative Coding Utrecht through Dot Grid. The report explains that its figures combine artist statements, funds set aside and pledge-based calculations, and should be read as approximate. The number is a contemporary reported charitable contribution, not independently verified evidence of the recipient receiving that exact amount.⁹

Preserving the exact label without inventing terms

The project reports the artwork licence as NIFTY, with neither a version nor a terms link. That label is retained exactly.⁶ NFT License version 2.0, dated November 5, 2018, was inspected as a possible referent. Its provisions distinguish personal use, verified marketplace display and certain third-party applications; it also limits modification and ties its grant to continued ownership. These are features of that candidate text, not proof that Dot Grid adopted that version.¹⁰

The header is a faithful, attributed image used within this noncommercial critical archive, with the original and canonical token linked. The presentation record identifies the unresolved licence version rather than presenting NIFTY as a blanket public-domain or Creative Commons grant. Ownership supports the collection caption but is not itself a transfer of copyright.

The artist program has no separate software licence notice in the inspected text. p5.js version 1.0.0 has LGPL 2.1 terms, which govern the dependency rather than automatically granting reuse rights in this artist's program.⁶¹¹ No artist code or image assets are redistributed in the seven-file package. Its CC0-1.0 dedication applies only to the original essay prose.

Both candidate holdings, editions 249 and 478, currently have the same indexed owner, which appears in the AB5D profile's complete three-wallet set. Edition 478 was actually viewed and selected for the header.¹²²

Five distributions of colour and open space

The comparison uses four verified early editions and one current AB5D holding. Their original renderers were actually inspected. The sample is purposive and does not establish which arrangements or palette families are rare.

Edition zero, token 115000000, has a fine dotted field with predominantly magenta and purple groups, interrupted by bright green. A large connected-looking accumulation occupies the lower left, while another diagonal accumulation crosses the upper-right area. Smaller detached forms punctuate the middle. The varying sizes make the page feel unevenly inhabited: the eye moves between dense patches and broad open passages rather than following a single central motif.¹

Edition one, token 115000001, also combines pink and green but distributes them differently. A broad multicoloured chain occupies the upper area, while a long pink-to-green formation descends near the lower centre-right. Several isolated groups at left prevent that vertical mass from becoming the only anchor. Small holes containing visible dots interrupt the coloured forms, making the underlying field perceptible inside as well as outside them.¹³

Edition ten, token 115000010, has larger cells and bolder outlines. Cyan, mint green and red-pink groups tend to occupy the edges, leaving a relatively open central field around one narrow pink cluster. The larger scale makes individual squares easier to count, while the separation between groups makes their silhouettes more legible. The image feels closer to an arrangement of discrete pieces than edition zero's finer, more crowded field.¹⁴

Edition twenty, token 115000020, pairs violet and purple with several intensities of green. A branching vertical chain extends through the lower centre; denser clusters sit toward the upper left and lower-left edge. The narrow central connection encourages the eye to join separate coloured regions into a larger route, although colour changes continually break that route into smaller units. Open white space remains substantial despite the many cells.¹⁵

Edition 478, token 115000478, is the header. Bright greens dominate the sides and lower edge, while a magenta vertical cluster occupies the centre. A thinner green chain runs down the right, ending near a purple strip. The central magenta form has enough surrounding space to read almost as a figure, but its black subdivisions keep it firmly within the grid. Its clear contrast between clustered colour and empty points makes the series' organizing principle easy to see.²

The field remains visible

Dot Grid's most consequential choice is to leave the grid present after the coloured composition has been made. Empty positions are active parts of the image: they separate clusters, measure distance and reveal holes. The work can look playful without requiring a game, and ordered without filling the whole available field.

Its variation joins colour relationships to local growth rather than treating palette and shape as unrelated decorations. Different densities change how the eye groups the same basic units. A coarse composition exposes its individual squares; a finer one can turn them into larger, irregular masses. The series makes that shift in perception available within a compact set of instructions.

Questions still requiring resolution are:

• Which artist account or dated prototypes explain the development beyond the short published statement?
• What original announcement and sale records establish the full public-opening and pricing schedule?
• What explains the August token allocation and original edition-cap history?
• Which NIFTY version applies, and what separate licence governs the artist code?
• Can recipient records reconcile the reported charitable contribution?