Incantation

The work and its context

Incantation is an 85-edition generative art series by Eliya Stein, released on Art Blocks as a Factory project on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 82.¹ The registry describes it in one sentence: "Ancient runes deterministically arranged and animated in order to create mysterious magic spells."¹ Each output is a square field of rune-like glyphs on a hash-tinted ground, gridded, color-drenched and quietly animated: individual signs shimmer, flash, cycle through colors or drift across the canvas, so that every token performs its own small ritual rather than sitting still.²³

Stein, who publishes under the name Pretty Blocks, is one of the more prolific early artists on the platform. The AB5D artist dossier counts five Stein projects in AB[500], the Art Blocks survey of its first 500 projects: Gravity Grid (81 editions, April 2021), Incantation (85), Labyrometry (800), Prismatic (218) and Liquid Ruminations (1,024), 2,208 editions in total.⁴ Incantation, his second release, arrived about two months after Gravity Grid warped the 19-by-19 Go board, and it trades the board for a field of signs.⁴ A 2022 press release for Stein's later Stella Artois collaboration describes the series simply as "Incantation, capturing ancient runes".⁵

The series sits in the Factory tier, the open middle track of early Art Blocks, and is tagged heritage status ab500 in the current index.¹ The runtime is p5@1.0.0 at a 1:1 aspect ratio with no external assets, and the artist link in the registry points to the Pretty Blocks account on X.¹

Conception and development

The project’s title invites an analogy: a spell is an ordered arrangement of symbols whose execution is expected to produce an effect, and so is a program. This comparison is an interpretation of the project’s title and drawing rules.² Stein's script literalizes the analogy. The token hash is disassembled into two ingredient tables, a bit for every hexadecimal character and an integer for every pair, and the "spell" of each token is the particular combination of magical effects those bits switch on: a golden shimmer here, a green flash there, a slow chromatic breathing, horizontal or vertical movement of alternating object IDs.² Tokens share a drawing vocabulary while different combinations of hash bits enable different effects.²

The choice of runes carries the same double reading. The glyph table is keyed by genuine Unicode rune characters, Elder Futhark and related signs such as ansuz, raidho and ingwaz, forms built for carving, predominantly angular in this drawing table. One table entry is keyed by the zero-width joiner, an invisible Unicode control character, yet it stores a fully visible tall glyph: a distinction between a lookup key and the visible polygon it identifies.² And because every glyph and color is drawn from a hash-derived sequence that yields its first byte once, then cycles through the remaining 31 bytes, glyph-and-color sequences recur across the grid; the field behaves less like a picture and more like a chant, one brief sequence repeated until it fills the square.²³

No artist interview or statement specific to Incantation was located: the registry's interview field is empty and the linked website is an X profile, which is login-walled beyond public metadata.¹ The conception account above is therefore this essay's reading of the project text, the dossier and the code itself, not a paraphrase of the artist's own words. Stein's documented professional background in advertising technology and browser security, fields preoccupied with systems and behavior under changing conditions, is relevant context recorded by the dossier.⁴

How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug incantation-by-eliya-stein and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 82. The retrieved script is 7,876 bytes with SHA-256 digest 405dbc530802bc9e6faa8dddeb5fb6c0a279d9f3506770bdc0bf84e31389af37 (recorded in evidence.json; the script itself is not redistributed). The indexed runtime is p5@1.0.0, aspect ratio 1:1, single script, no external asset dependencies.¹²

The script is a compact single-line p5 sketch. It sets seed to tokenData.hash, then derives two tables: BB, one parity bit per character of the hash string, and II, one integer per hexadecimal pair. A generator function cycles endlessly through II and serves as the only random source. The canvas is a square of side equal to the smaller window dimension. The builder walks a grid from just outside the canvas to just past its far edge in steps of one twelfth of the side, producing 14 by 14 positions, 196 runes, each stamped with a glyph, a size and a color.² Kimi reported counting 196 rune objects for #16 and comparing its hash with the indexed record.⁶

Four structural decisions shape every output. First, scale: a size class SZR of 4, 8, 12 or 20 is chosen by hash bits, and each rune is scaled by SZR, so a SZR-4 token is a sparse field of small signs while a SZR-20 token is a dense crush of glyphs up to one sixth of the canvas in height, far wider than the grid step and therefore overlapping. Notably, the SZR-12 branch is unreachable: its condition reads the bit derived from the letter x of the hash's "0x" prefix, which is not a hexadecimal digit and evaluates to a non-numeric, falsy value, so inspected and live-verified tokens show only 4, 8 and 20.²⁶ Second, the alphabet: 36 polygon glyphs stored as point lists in a JSON table keyed by rune characters, one key being the zero-width joiner. Third, color: each rune takes red, green, blue and alpha straight from the cycling hash stream, which is why some signs sit at near-invisible transparency; the background is three hex-pair values, replaced by black when one control value is low. Fourth, the spells: a per-frame function rewrites rune properties under bit-gated conditions, golden shimmer for every eleventh rune, an unconditional grayscale flicker for IDs congruent to 4 modulo 18, a three-channel color cycle, green flashes for large grids, a white shimmer, and alternating object IDs moving horizontally or vertically with wraparound at small scales.²

Kimi reported inspecting internal rendering state for token 82000016: the hash matched the indexed token record, 196 runes and SZR 8 were counted, and the unconditional flicker rune changed from rgba(186,186,186,1) to rgba(254,254,254,1) while the frame counter advanced from 82 to 161 over three seconds.⁶ Direct inspection found no audio code.² The program was retrieved from the current Art Blocks index. This inspection does not establish its complete storage history or compare it with a block-pinned chain retrieval.¹²

Independent browser observation of #16 confirmed automatic animation: glyphs changed horizontal position while several signs brightened to white between screenshots. This visible comparison verifies movement and colour change without relying on the contributor’s internal object counts.⁶

The mint

The current Art Blocks index distinguishes the first mint, activation, scheduled start and completion.¹⁷ Edition 0 (token 82000000) was minted on June 2, 2021 at 03:59:07 UTC, about eighteen hours before the project was activated at 22:16:10 UTC, a pre-activation mint whose allocation is not established here. The second token was minted at 22:25:28 UTC, and the registry's sale-start timestamp is that same second: these two index fields coincide, without independently identifying a public purchase.¹⁷ The official collection page accordingly reads "Released Jun 2, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC".⁸

The sale then moved at a measured pace. The inspected token records show edition 10 minted on June 3, edition 16 on June 4 and edition 20 on June 6, and the 85th and final edition closed the series on June 27, 2021 at 18:49:25 UTC, about twenty-five and a half days after the first mint.⁷ The sequence describes indexed events; it does not classify artist, reserved or public allocations.¹

The minted count equals the maximum of 85, and the project is marked complete and locked. These are current values; the original announced maximum has not been independently recovered.¹ The currently indexed price is 0.1 ETH per token; no dated 2021 source inspected here states the original mint price, so that figure is reported as the present registry value and the launch price remains unverified.¹

Copyright and licensing

The current project record reports the artwork label "Nifty License" without a terms URL.¹ The generic NFT License 2.0 published by Dapper Labs is not sufficient evidence that this series adopted that exact version. Specific permissions therefore remain unresolved; no commercial allowance from that template is asserted for Incantation.⁹

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.² The single declared runtime dependency, p5.js 1.0.0, has an LGPL 2.1 licence in its version-pinned repository, distinct from any permission for Stein’s program.¹⁰ Owning an Incantation token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.⁷

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, chosen to span the size classes, the background range and the mint chronology, including the AB5D-held edition.⁷³ Size-class and effect attributions below combine visual reading with the script's bit logic; per-token palette names do not exist in this project, since colors come straight from the hash stream.²

Edition 0 (token 82000000, minted June 2, 2021, the pre-activation mint) is the large end of the system: a bright green ground under huge overlapping runes, SZR 20, glyphs so wide they collide into a tangled polychrome thicket where individual signs are hard to count.⁷³ Edition 1 (token 82000001), the second indexed mint, is the opposite pole: a yellow-green ground with medium-sized, separated runes, SZR 8, in pink, blue, red, black and brown, several so transparent they barely register, the alpha channel doing quiet compositional work.⁷³ Set side by side, the two editions show that one bit-gated constant moves the work between heraldic clutter and a minimalist scattered field. Edition 10 (token 82000010, June 3) demonstrates the black-background override: black ground, small runes, SZR 4, in red, green, blue, purple and gold, the colors gaining a lantern quality against the dark.⁷³ Edition 20 (token 82000020, June 6) returns to maximum scale on a dark olive ground, a dense overlapping crush of orange, green, pink and blue signs, the most chaotic surface in the sample.⁷³

Edition 16 (token 82000016, minted June 4, 2021), the AB5D-held example, rewards the longest look.⁷¹¹ Its violet ground comes from a rule chosen by the artist: the background channels are the sixth, sixteenth and twenty-sixth hex pairs of its hash, which compute to (112, 48, 232). Its size class is 8, and its spell recipe is unusually legible. The gold-shimmer condition, bits 23 and 24 of the hash, is active, which explains the scattered saturated yellow runes glowing against the violet; the diagonal-tint bit is also set, recoloring the main diagonal. Most striking is the repetition: rows of identical glyphs recur across the grid at a regular interval, the visible signature of the 31-value cycling generator, the field literally chanting one short sequence. Kimi’s runtime report recorded the mechanics: 196 runes, SZR 8, the flicker rune brightening measurably over three seconds, and the reported hash matching the indexed token record.²⁶³

Significance and limitations

Incantation is an early, economical demonstration of what the Art Blocks hash makes possible: not just a unique image per token, but a unique behavior. By gating each animation on its own conjunction of hash bits, Stein turned the hash into a spellbook index, so that tokens differ in what they do, not only in how they look.² The ritual framing also reads now as an unusually precise statement of what long-form generative art is: ordered symbols, executed, producing an effect.¹⁴ The series has held a place in Stein's subsequent reputation: a 2022 Stella Artois press release names it among the works he is known for, in what the press release described as the first brand partnership hosted by Art Blocks, and the Verse description of his later project Glitch Galactic specifies that it was offered as a free mint to holders of Incantation and his three other early Art Blocks series.⁵¹²

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the 2021 sale is not established by any dated 2021 source inspected here; only the current registry value of 0.1 ETH is recorded.¹
• No artist statement or interview specific to the series was located; the conception account rests on the project text, the AB5D dossier and the code.¹⁴
• The SZR-12 size class is unreachable in the shipped script because its gating bit derives from the non-hexadecimal "x" of the hash prefix; whether the artist knew is unverifiable from inspected sources.²⁶
• Visual attributions of effects to specific hash bits were verified arithmetically only for token 82000016; all five size classes were independently recalculated from the freshly retrieved token hashes.²⁶