Recursion

The work and its context

Recursion is a 256-edition generative art series by Hevey, released on Art Blocks as a Factory project on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 192.¹ Each output is a field of nested rectangles: an initial block is divided into smaller blocks, which are divided again, down to a hash-chosen depth, so that the composition reads as a floor plan drawn by a fractal. The concept is stated plainly in the registry description, and the artist maintains a dedicated concept page that walks through the division depth by depth.¹² The description also makes a second, stranger claim: "In this project, even the script is recursive!", meaning each finished variation can itself generate further variations, keeping the same properties, with a single click.¹ That claim was tested live and holds.³

Hevey is a pseudonymous generative artist, born circa 1990 in Europe, who has released algorithmic collections on Art Blocks since 2021, each a self-contained system seeded by the transaction hash.⁴ Four of his projects sit in AB[500]: Cells (1,024 editions, August 2021), Abstraction (256), Recursion (256) and Structures (256, November 2022), an arc the AB5D dossier describes as moving "from organic metaphor through geometric reduction and iterative logic to constructed spatial order."⁴ His own site lists a wider output across Ethereum and fxhash, including Constructions Mentales, Dencity, Ruins and Trasiedoc.⁵

The series runs on p5@1.0.0 at a square aspect ratio with no external assets, and it is catalogued independently on Verse as part of the AB[500] and Art Blocks Presents presentation, heritage Factory, 256 items.¹⁶

Conception and development

The conception is unusually literal: the artwork is about recursion, built with recursion, and named Recursion. The registry description defines the system in one breath, a block "irregularly divided into smaller blocks, which are then divided into smaller blocks, which are then divided into smaller blocks, etc, based on a defined depth", and points to the artist's concept page for a visual proof.¹ That page shows the same block at depths 0 through 4, then demonstrates the script's own recursion with a grid of variations of one variation.² Few projects in this batch document their own idea this directly; the concept page functions as both artist statement and technical manual.²

The dossier reads the series within Hevey's trajectory as the moment he "isolates and aestheticizes one of the primary engines of generative complexity", noting that simple starting conditions and repeated rules "yield results whose complexity exceeds what could be manually specified."⁴ The script supports that reading and adds a layer the prose does not mention: the system is not one algorithm but a family of modes, grayscale studies, a single-color cream variant with a circular frame, outline drawings, gradient fields, four-quadrant compositions, diamond rotations, each gated by its own hash roll, so the recursive engine is asked to perform in several distinct visual dialects.⁷

No interview specific to Recursion was located; the registry interview field is empty.¹ The conception account therefore rests on the description, the concept page, the dossier and the code, which together are unusually consistent with one another.¹⁷⁴²

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 recursion-by-hevey and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 192. The retrieved script is 7,553 bytes with SHA-256 digest 613e7d7dfc363c9fc1f2273e93b941a7faeb92bdcfc01e5131020bb3d95d5c1e (recorded in evidence.json; the script itself is not redistributed). The indexed runtime is p5@1.0.0, aspect ratio 1.0, single script, no external asset dependencies.¹⁷

The script is dense, minified into a single line, and reads the hash directly: a helper function slices hexadecimal substrings of the hash and reduces them modulo each parameter's range, so every stylistic decision traces to specific hash positions.⁷ Those decisions form a cascade. A style roll picks the mode: normal color, a grayscale study on white or black, a cream-on-brown single-color variant that adds a circular frame, or a constrained fourth mode. A depth roll sets the recursion depth between one and six. Further rolls fix the margin ratio, an aspect-ratio constraint, the minimum block size, an optional canvas rotation of 90, 180 or 270 degrees, a diamond rotation, a four-quadrant split, an outline-only rendering, and a bilinear gradient fill that interpolates four palette colors across each leaf block.⁷ One parameter is not a roll at all: the script reads the last four digits of the token ID, and when that number is zero, meaning edition 0, it forces the normal mode, depth five, palette index 19 and the loosest aspect constraint, a deliberate showcase configuration for the artist's own first mint.⁷⁸

The recursion itself lives in a single block class. Each block carries a grid of cells; thirteen hard-coded binary patterns can pre-seed child blocks, and a packing routine then tries to fit rectangles of decreasing area into the remaining free cells, rejecting any whose proportions violate the aspect constraint, and recursing while the depth budget and minimum size allow.⁷ Leaf blocks are filled from one of twenty-seven hand-listed palettes, either flat or through the gradient mode, or left as stroked outlines in the outline variant.⁷ Rendering is one-shot p5: noLoop in setup, no animation, no audio code.⁷ The interaction is the conceptual point: mouseClicked seeds p5's random generator from the current hash, mints a fresh pseudo-hash, and redraws, while the top-level parameters computed at load stay fixed, so the click produces a new subdivision with the same depth, palette and style. The s key saves the canvas.⁷ Live testing on token 192000113 confirmed the mechanics: the chain hash stayed constant while the working hash changed across two clicks, the layout changed each time, and the white ground and crimson-teal palette held exactly.³

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 18, 2026, spans about three and a half months.¹⁸ Edition 0 (token 192000000) was minted on October 22, 2021 at 08:08:04 UTC, eight days before the project was activated on October 30 at 01:48:01 UTC, a pre-activation artist mint; the Verse series page independently carries this same timestamp as the release date.¹⁸⁶ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads November 2, 2021 at 19:00:00 UTC, the official collection page carries "Released Nov 2, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC", and the second token was minted thirty-four minutes later at 19:33:54 UTC.¹⁹⁸

The sale had two waves. November 2021 brought 132 of the 256 editions; December slowed to 19; then January 2022 added 77 and February 27, closing the series on February 15, 2022 at 23:00:25 UTC.⁸ The minted count equals the maximum of 256, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.¹ The currently indexed price is 0.25 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 The Verse page, inspected for present-day context, recorded 182 owners, 7 listings and a highest sale of 1,059 dollars at access time.⁶ The AB5D collection's edition 113 was minted eighteen days into the public sale, on November 20, 2021.⁸¹⁰

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC 4.0" for Recursion, with no linked terms URL in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC 4.0.¹ The CC BY-NC 4.0 deed grants anyone the freedom to share the material, copy and redistribute it in any medium or format, and to adapt it, remix, transform and build upon it, under two conditions: attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes, and NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes; the deed also forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions on the freedoms it grants.¹¹

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.⁷ The single declared runtime dependency, p5.js 1.0.0, is third-party software under its own licence.¹ Owning a Recursion 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.⁸

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, chosen to span the style modes, the depth range and the mint chronology, including the AB5D-held edition.⁸¹²

Edition 0 (token 192000000, minted October 22, 2021, the pre-activation artist mint) shows the forced showcase configuration exactly as the code dictates: depth five, palette 19, loose aspect constraint. On a black ground, dense clusters of red and mint blocks nest inside one another down to the pixel scale, with larger solid rectangles floating above the fractal weave like panes of glass. It is the system's maximum-density demonstration, and its palette matches the table's twentieth entry in every role.⁷⁸¹²

Edition 1 (token 192000001, the first public mint, November 2, 2021) balances solid and divided: large orange-red and steel-blue rectangles anchor the field while dense clusters pack the interstices, a mid-depth read of the same engine.⁸¹² Edition 10 (token 192000010) lands the outline mode: on a white ground, every rectangle is an unfilled stroke in crimson or teal, the dense clusters reduced to wireframe, so the packing algorithm itself, not the color, becomes the subject.⁷⁸¹²

Edition 20 (token 192000020) rewards a long look as the gradient mode. Each leaf block is shaded by bilinear interpolation, so the whole field drifts smoothly from mint green through beige to red across a black ground, and the recursive grid reads as a single luminous object rather than a collection of parts. The same packing logic that produces hard-edged siblings here produces atmosphere, which is the clearest demonstration in the sample of how much the mode rolls matter.⁷⁸¹²

Edition 113 (token 192000113, minted November 20, 2021), the AB5D-held example, is the minimal pole: a white ground, one dominant crimson square, and a loose scatter of teal, dark-teal and pale-gray rectangles with wide breathing room, matching the table's second palette in every role.⁷⁸¹² Its inspection extended to the live renderer, where the chain hash held constant across two clicks while the working hash and the layout changed twice, and the palette and white ground stayed fixed, the description's "variations of a variation" promise verified in the browser.³

Significance and limitations

Recursion is a compact proof that a concept, a name and an implementation can be the same object. The work is recursion performed at three levels at once: the packing algorithm recurses, the outputs recurse visually, and the script recurses on itself through the click mechanic, which turns every mint into a generator of further generators.¹⁷ Within Hevey's four-project arc in AB[500] it is the purest statement of method, and its concept page remains one of the clearest pieces of artist-authored documentation in this batch.⁴² The edition-0 showcase override is also a small documentary gift: the artist's own mint is hard-coded to demonstrate the system at full depth, which makes token 192000000 a reliable reference output for the whole series.⁷⁸

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 0.25 ETH is recorded.¹
• No Recursion-specific artist interview was located; the registry interview field is empty.¹
• The January 2022 second wave (77 mints after a 19-mint December) has no documented cause in inspected sources.⁸
• The artist works pseudonymously; biographical detail beyond the dossier's circa-1990, Europe framing was not verified against independent sources.⁴
• Mode and palette attributions for individual tokens are visual readings confirmed against the script's tables, not recomputed from the hashes.⁷