Non Either

The work and its context

Non Either is project 260 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 100 invocations against a maximum of 100, the runtime js@na (plain JavaScript with no library), a square aspect ratio, the licence label CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and the creative credit "Code by Reinier Feijen" ¹. Its vertical is Playground, although the index's curation field reads "factory" ¹. The Art Blocks page calls it an "Art Blocks 500 release" in the Playground category, released on 8 February 2022 ².

The whole project text is two sentences: "Circles move in, circles move out, some light, some dark. 🌹 The work is responsive, it will adapt to any screen size and resolution" ¹. Each output is an endless animation. Circles of one size, each filled with a radial gradient and ringed in white, stream towards or away from the centre of the screen and pile over one another.

Rozendaal (born 1980 in Amsterdam, based in New York) is one of the first artists to use the website as an artwork ²³. Art Blocks' biography notes that he also makes installations, tapestries, lenticulars and books, and has shown at the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney and the Stedelijk Museum ². Non Either came after his own large NFT edition, Endless Nameless (August 2021). He gave half of that edition's proceeds to Rhizome, which Wikipedia describes as "the largest private donation in Rhizome's history" ³. It came before his second Art Blocks project, Polychrome Music, made with the musician Danny Wolfers (Legowelt) and released in August 2022 ⁴.

Conception and development

Rozendaal does not write code. Asked about it on Twitter, he replied on his website: "My coding knowledge is tiny. Smaller than a pimple on a fruitfly." He credits Reinier Feijen: "He is very friendly and patient and he enjoys the process of solving visual puzzles" ⁵. In a 2013 conversation with Jürg Lehni, he said he met Feijen at art school, where Feijen was studying artificial intelligence, and that "our roles are clear" ⁶. The index gives Feijen the code credit for Non Either ¹. The earlier AB5D essay credited a developer called BoxOfChocolates. No source consulted for this draft supports that.

The work belongs to a practice built on the browser. In a 2021 interview Rozendaal said of his code-based work, "It's not video", and "I don't know any other medium where you're that flexible" ⁷. MoMA describes his method: each work begins as a paper storyboard before it is translated into code ⁸. Non Either's short program follows that pattern: a fixed set of colours, one shape and one motion, re-seeded by each token hash.

Rozendaal spoke about the release in a Metadibs interview published a few days after the mint. "It was in one minute! I think we priced it a little bit too low :-)", he said. He also described what an Art Blocks edition meant to him: "like a group of a hundred people own one work together and each person owns a unique version of a work" ⁹. The same article gives two different sell-out times, one minute and thirty minutes, and mentions a gas war ⁹. The mint data below settles the question.

The artist's own website gives the project a page, "Non Either (2022)". It carries the project text and a thumbnail of token 0 ¹⁰. Each token also has its own page there, such as newrafael.com/non-either/93, alongside his other generative series ¹¹.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 3,766 bytes, SHA-256 d70830b0ae4599d7b287d4b37e37920fe8e083b8158fa1c71feeb20ec2c97ebd. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full; no code is reproduced here ¹. It has no feature script. To test the traits, the generator and the palette logic were ported to Python and run against the hashes of all 100 tokens. The port reproduces every published Composition, Movement, Colors and Color Count value (own computation) ¹.

The program seeds a xorshift generator from the first 32 hex digits of the hash. It then makes four draws ¹:

1. Composition. "Chaos" has weight 1; "Spiral" and "Spiral Dense" have 0.5 each. A Spiral is one stream of circles spawned along two rotating arms. A Spiral Dense uses three arms. A Chaos adds an eight-armed second stream with slower, jittered circles (code reading).
2. Movement. Inward with probability 0.75, otherwise Outward.
3. Colour mode. With probability 0.125 the program takes a keyed group of gradients: all nine dark gradients, all seven light ones, or the dark and light versions of a single hue. Otherwise it shuffles the 17 gradients and keeps 1, 2 or 3 of them (weight 2 each) or 4, 5, 6, 7, 11 or 14 (weight 1 each).
4. Direction. A final coin toss mirrors the scene horizontally, which reverses the direction of spin.

The 17 gradients are the core of the look. Nine run from a black centre through a hue to a white rim. Seven run from a hue to white, and one runs from black to white. The hues are lavender, red, sky blue, blue, violet, magenta, pink, orange and green. Blue and violet have only dark versions ¹.

The Colors label is not the colour mode drawn. It describes the result. Twelve of the 20 Mono tokens drew a single random gradient, and only eight came from a keyed hue group. Thirteen of the 14 Dark tokens are random mixtures that happen to contain only black-centred gradients (own computation) ¹.

Every circle in a token has the same radius. The radius is 20 per cent of the shorter side, scaled by a table keyed to the screen's aspect ratio. On a square screen that gives about 14 per cent. On a tall phone screen circles are about twice as large, relative to its width. This is the concrete sense in which the work "will adapt to any screen size" (code reading) ¹. At the program's speed setting, a circle in the main stream takes about two minutes to cross from the centre to beyond the corner. A new one is spawned about every 0.4 seconds (code reading). Before the first frame, the program back-fills each stream so that the screen opens already full ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

Each point below comes from a full read of the program and a test against all 100 token records. Code-only points are marked.

1. Depth from drawing order. Inward circles are added to the front of their list, and outward circles to the back. The list is drawn from back to front. In both cases the circles nearest the edge sit on top of those nearer the centre, so the centre always reads as far away, like the end of a tunnel (code reading) ¹.
2. Inward circles wait, then arrive together. An inward circle first sits off-screen for a delay: the stream's longest travel time minus its own. It then eases in with an accelerating curve. In Chaos compositions, every circle in the second stream therefore reaches the centre the same time after it spawns, whatever its speed. Outward circles start at once and decelerate (code reading) ¹.
3. In Chaos, one stream always lies over the other. The two streams are drawn in turn, so the eight-armed second stream covers the first everywhere, whatever the distance from the centre (code reading) ¹.
4. A scale call that does nothing. The resize routine scales the drawing context by the device pixel ratio and then sets the canvas width. Setting the width resets the context, which cancels the scale. The work still renders sharply, because every coordinate is already in device pixels (code reading) ¹.
5. The canvas is never cleared. No frame erases the previous one. Because the screen is always covered by circles, this matters only in the small gaps, where earlier paint lingers (code reading; not confirmed in a live browser) ¹.
6. A resize restarts the work. Resizing the window re-seeds from the hash and rebuilds every stream. The token keeps its identity, but the animation starts over. The frame step is capped at 34 milliseconds, so the motion slows rather than jumps on a slow machine or a background tab (code reading) ¹.
7. Groups that were never drawn. The keyed modes include "all seven light gradients" and single-hue groups for lavender and red. No minted token uses any of them. Only one token, #64, drew the keyed all-dark group. No lavender token and no pure-blue token is Mono. Violet can be Mono only through a single random pick, as in #97 and #98 (own computation) ¹.
8. An unused version tag. The script opens by declaring a constant set to "20211206c". Nothing reads it; it looks like a build date of 6 December 2021 (code reading) ¹.
9. Invisible traits. The mirrored direction splits the edition 44 to 56, but it is not published as a feature. The black-to-white gradient appears in 23 tokens and has no label of its own (own computation) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No published collector guide to Non Either was found. What follows combines the trait counts with the few sales that could be verified.

The only keyed Dark (1 of 100). #64 is the only token that drew the full group of nine black-centred gradients. With 11 colours it ties for the highest Color Count, and it is an Outward Chaos ¹.

Light (3 of 100). #30, #33 and #81 are the only tokens with no black at all, just two hue-to-white gradients each. All three are Inward Chaos ¹.

Mono (20 of 100). Sky blue is the commonest Mono hue (six tokens), and orange and red have one each (own computation). #97 and #98 are violet, a hue that has no keyed group. #97 is also Outward ¹.

#21, the most expensive sale found. #21 is a Spiral that drew 14 gradients and 10 colours ¹. Art Blocks' August 2022 interview with Rozendaal and Wolfers illustrates it with the credit "collection of comsicomsa" ⁴. Etherscan gives its last sale as 2.75 ETH, without a visible date. It lists the current holder as an address labelled talmadge.eth, which the index shows holding three tokens ¹²¹. OpenSea's collection page also lists #21 as the top sale ¹³.

Composition and motion. Outward motion is the scarcer direction (21 tokens). Outward Spiral Dense is the rarest pairing, with four tokens (own computation) ¹.

Notable collectors

• Museum of Modern Art. MoMA's installation "Light: Rafaël Rozendaal" ran in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby from 16 November 2024 to 1 September 2025. It showed a selection of his works on a screen nearly 25 feet high, each sampled for two to three minutes ⁸. MoMA's exhibition page lists Non Either among the works to "see these artworks in motion", linked to the artist's project page ⁸. This is inclusion in an exhibition, not evidence that MoMA owns a token.
• Museum Folkwang. The website for "Rafaël Rozendaal: Color, Code, Communication" (Essen, 21 April to 20 August 2023) lists "Non Either, 2022, Various Collections" under "NFTs, 2021–2022", with "Code by Reinier Feijen" ¹⁴¹⁵. Whether a token was shown in the galleries is not confirmed.
• AB5D holds #93 ¹¹⁶. Etherscan gives its last sale as 0.69 WETH, without a date ¹⁶.
• At retrieval the 100 tokens sat in 59 addresses. The largest held seven, and 43 held one each ¹. No source consulted names the largest holders.

The mint

Token 0 was minted on 27 January 2022 at 21:45:15 UTC, twelve days before the public sale ¹. The index records activation on 3 February and a start time of 20:00:00 UTC on 8 February 2022. Tokens 1 to 99 were minted between 20:00:26 and 20:01:23 ¹. Eighty-one were minted with the same block timestamp, 20:00:47, which fits the gas war the Metadibs article describes (own computation) ¹⁹. Rozendaal's "in one minute" is accurate to the second ⁹.

The indexed price field is 0.2 ETH ¹. Whether the public sale used that price, or a different price or mechanism, could not be confirmed. At retrieval the lowest listing was 0.579 ETH ¹. OpenSea showed a total traded volume of about US$531,600 and a 7.5 per cent creator fee ¹³.

Rozendaal's websites and the question of ownership

Non Either takes Rozendaal's long-running question of how to sell a public artwork and applies it to a blockchain edition. In 2011 he published the Art Website Sales Contract, drafted with the lawyer Aernoud Bourdrez. Rhizome reported that it "explains the rights and duties of the artist and the collector, to make sure the work remains intact as long as possible" ¹⁷. Under it, the buyer owns the domain name and both parties keep the work publicly accessible ³¹⁸. His website ifnoyes.com sold at Phillips in 2013 for $3,500 ³.

The same logic runs through Non Either. The code is public on-chain, and anyone can watch every token on the artist's site or on Art Blocks ¹⁰¹¹. What the collector holds is the token. Rozendaal described the Art Blocks form as a hundred people owning "one work together" ⁹. In an earlier interview he described the NFT as "this idea of permanent ownership and how that's a whole different feeling" ¹⁹.

No physical version of Non Either was found. Rozendaal's physical series, the Into Time lenticular paintings and the Abstract Browsing jacquard tapestries, are separate bodies of work. They were shown together, for example, at Takuro Someya Contemporary Art in Tokyo in November and December 2022 ²⁰. No Non Either lenticular, tapestry or print was found in his exhibition records.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, without a link ¹. The label allows non-commercial sharing with attribution but no derivatives. It rules out both commercial reproduction and adapted versions without permission. Rozendaal's site applies the same licence to his other on-chain series, such as Rooms ²¹. The program carries no separate code licence. The renders in this essay come from the Art Blocks media proxy and are used for reference.

Significance and limitations

Non Either is one of Rozendaal's few generative editions. It is a short program, credited to his long-time programmer Reinier Feijen, that extends his browser-based abstractions into an edition of 100. Its artistic claim is a depth illusion made from flat means: one circle size, radial gradients and a strict drawing order. MoMA's choice to link it in "Light", and its listing in the Folkwang retrospective, place it within his main body of work rather than beside it ⁸¹⁴. Its limits are clear too. The traits describe palette groupings more than visual structure, the stills show little of the motion, and the sales record is thin.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What was the public mint price and mechanism on 8 February 2022? The index shows 0.2 ETH, which Rozendaal's comment about pricing "too low" could fit.
2. When was #21 sold for 2.75 ETH, and who is "comsicomsa"? The name comes from an automated extraction of an image caption and should be checked against the article.
3. Was Non Either shown physically at Museum Folkwang, or only listed? Which tokens did MoMA's installation sample?
4. Who wrote the Art Blocks integration: Feijen alone, as the index says, or with the BoxOfChocolates credit in the earlier essay? A search of X (not fetchable here) for @newrafael's posts from February 2022 is a lead.
5. The quotations from Metadibs, from Rozendaal's reply on coding and from the Folkwang website came from automated WebFetch extraction and need checking against the pages.

Bibliography