Swing

The work and its context

Swing is a 310-edition generative art series by Eltono, released on Art Blocks as a Factory project on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 184.¹ Each output is a poster-like composition: a colored margin, a paper sheet, a background divided into rows or columns, and a handful of thick, round-ended lines that cross the sheet and lock into what the artist calls straightforward graphic signs. Some outputs look like logos, some like letters, some almost minimal, but all are built by one small rule set the artist names the Swing protocol.¹²

Eltono is a French artist born in Paris in 1975 who began writing graffiti along railway lines in 1989, moved to Madrid in 1999, and traded the aerosol tag for geometric forms made with brushes, acrylic and masking tape.³ His mature practice is built on protocols: published rule sets that he, or sometimes participants, execute on walls, where the dimensions of the site, the time available and the behavior of passersby all shape the result. The AB5D dossier summarizes the stance: an artist can establish conditions, but the finished work emerges through contingency.³ Swing is that stance translated on chain, with the token hash playing the role of the wall.¹⁴

The series is one of two Eltono projects in AB[500], alongside Andradite (222 editions).³ It runs on p5@1.0.0 at a portrait aspect ratio of 0.77 with no external assets, and the artist's own project page, linked from the registry, presents the work with the same matter-of-fact documentation he uses for wall protocols, down to a full public specification of the rules.¹²

Conception and development

The conception is a direct port of Eltono's protocol method, and unusually, the primary documentation is the artist's own. His project page specifies the system in the same declarative style as his wall protocols: "The Swing protocol works on a 3×2 grid. 7 different lines and an empty shape are randomly placed on the grid (position and rotation are picked at random) on 2 layers. The background is divided in 3 rows or 2 columns that can be filled with 9 different colors or 3 different stripes."² The page goes on to enumerate the margin and paper colors, the line colors, the grid colors, the stripe orientations and widths, and the binary particularities: line rotation on or off, grid on or off, paper corners rounded or square.²

What the page also makes clear is that randomness here is heavily curated. Eltono writes that "the parameters are set so that every composition is well balanced and all the images have the right amount of swing", and the registry description repeats that the protocol "is finely tuned so that the interaction between all the elements always" produces a coherent result.¹² The script shows how that tuning is implemented: every color and line option carries an integer weight, so common cases dominate and exotic ones stay rare, and a few outcomes are gated behind percentage rolls of five percent or less.⁴ This is the street protocol logic exactly: the artist fixes the conditions and their probabilities, then lets each execution, here each mint, land where it lands.³

The code itself carries biographical traces: variable and function names are in French (txPcGrille, opLigne, opColonne, margeD, margeG), the working language of a Paris-born artist, and the color table mixes descriptive names like Light Ocher, Dark Beige and Bordeaux that read like a painter's inventory rather than a programmer's.⁴ No interview specific to Swing was located; the registry interview field is empty, so the conception account rests on the artist's project page, the dossier and the script.¹

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 swing-by-eltono and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 184. The retrieved script is 12,677 bytes with SHA-256 digest 61442c6ffc5fe942606f758ed6e13ee03ce1d9a0a1eb78d4411263a6820c9270 (recorded in evidence.json; the script itself is not redistributed). The indexed runtime is p5@1.0.0, aspect ratio 0.77, single script, no external asset dependencies.¹⁴

The seed path is the standard one for this cohort: the first sixteen hexadecimal characters of the token hash become an integer that drives a small Random class, and every later choice comes from that stream.⁴ The composition is assembled from two weighted tables. The first holds 51 color entries, each a hex value with an integer weight and a category letter, covering the background, paper and margin palettes: weights of 14 to 16 make turquoise, red, blue, green and the ochers common, while entries like Bordeaux at weight 1 stay rare. The second table holds the line shapes, also weighted, from which exactly seven are drawn.⁴ Drawing proceeds in layers: the margin, the paper sheet with square or rounded corners (a 55 to 45 percent roll), the background split into three rows or two columns with solid or striped fills, and then the seven lines placed on the 3 by 2 grid across two layers, each square holding two, one or zero lines, with rotation applied or not per the protocol's switches.⁴²

Three outcomes are rare enough to function as traits, and the script names them as such through a setTraits helper: Lines come out White on a five percent roll, Green on a three percent roll, and Dark Blue otherwise; Paper Corners are Square or Round.⁴ Rendering is one-shot: p5 in P2D mode, an offscreen graphics buffer at print resolution (the sheet plus margins at roughly 1000 by 1500 units before scaling), noLoop called in setup, no animation, no interaction handlers and no audio code.⁴ The live renderer confirmed the static character for token 184000240: the reported hash matched the chain record, the frame counter read 1 at two observations four seconds apart, and no audio elements exist in the page.⁵ On chain, only the token hash and ownership are stored; the script lives in the Art Blocks project registry and executes once in the viewer's browser.¹⁴

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 18, 2026, tells a two-speed story.¹⁶ Edition 0 (token 184000000) was minted on October 21, 2021 at 07:10:41 UTC, eleven days before the project was activated on November 1 at 18:30:38 UTC, a pre-activation artist mint. The registry's sale-start timestamp reads November 2, 2021 at 16:00:00 UTC, the official collection page carries "Released Nov 2, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC", and the second token was minted twenty-seven minutes later at 16:27:10 UTC.¹⁷⁶

The launch month was brisk but not a sellout: 171 of the 310 editions were minted in November 2021. Then the sale slowed dramatically, and the token records read like a thermometer of the cooling market: 16 editions in December 2021, single-digit months through the first half of 2022, a brief revival of 35 in July 2022, 15 more in December 2022, and then near-silence until a final block of 32 editions in February 2024 closed the series on February 5, 2024 at 23:02:35 UTC.⁶ From first mint to completion the sale ran about 27 months, by far the longest in this batch, and the AB5D collection's own edition 240 was minted midway through that long tail, on July 17, 2022.⁶⁸

The minted count equals the maximum of 310, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.¹ The currently indexed price is 0.15 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 project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC 4.0" for Swing, with no linked terms URL in the record.¹ The artist's own project page states the same terms in plain language: "All the images are unique 1/1 Artworks sold under non commercial license: CC BY-NC 4.0", with a link to the Creative Commons deed.² This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC 4.0, an unusually well-corroborated rights record for this batch because registry and artist documentation agree.¹²

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.⁹ Note what this means for a generative series: the licence attaches to the artwork, and its Adapt permission is broader than the NFT License used on many peer projects, though commercial use remains barred.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.⁴ The single declared runtime dependency, p5.js 1.0.0, is third-party software under its own licence.¹ Owning a Swing 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.⁶

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, chosen to span the line-color traits, the corner and background switches and the mint chronology, including the AB5D-held edition.⁶¹⁰

Edition 0 (token 184000000, minted October 21, 2021, the pre-activation artist mint) shows the protocol at full density: a dark navy margin, a beige paper carrying vertical navy-and-beige stripes, a three-row background of teal, salmon and dark blue, and seven thick navy lines whose bends and crossings read, almost irresistibly, as a jumping figure with raised arms. It is the clearest demonstration in the sample of Eltono's claim that the outputs behave like signs: the same seven strokes that are pure geometry in one reading become a pictogram in another.⁶¹⁰²

Edition 1 (token 184000001, the first public mint, November 2, 2021) pushes the striped mode further: a pink sheet over a margin of the same family, the background a buzzing magenta-and-green vertical stripe field that vibrates behind the calmer salmon squares and the navy sign.⁶¹⁰ Edition 20 (token 184000020) shows the rounded-corners switch and a two-column background of navy and yellow on a magenta sheet with a mint-green margin, the lines here reading as a striding walker.⁶¹⁰

Edition 10 (token 184000010) rewards a long look because it lands the rarest line roll in the sample. Its seven strokes come out saturated green, the three-percent Lines trait, and the effect is startling against the dark blue square and salmon paper: the sign detaches from the sheet like neon tubing, where its navy siblings sit down into the composition. One percentage-gated roll changes the entire temperature of the piece, which is exactly the kind of contingency Eltono's protocols are built to admit.⁴⁶¹⁰

Edition 240 (token 184000240, minted July 17, 2022, ten months into the long tail), the AB5D-held example, is the elegant pole the artist promised: a beige margin, a pink rounded sheet, a quiet three-row background of yellow and ocher, and a sparse navy sign whose long vertical stroke and hooked curve give it the poise of a character from an invented alphabet.⁶⁸¹⁰ Its inspection extended to the live renderer, where the hash matched the chain record and the work's static, single-frame character was confirmed at two observations.⁵

Significance and limitations

Swing is a documented bridge between two art worlds that often talk past each other: the European protocol-based street practice, in which a published rule set meets an unpredictable site, and long-form on-chain generative art, in which a published script meets an unpredictable hash. Eltono did not approximate the analogy; he shipped the protocol specification on his own site alongside the mint, so the work can be read the same way his walls are read.⁴² The series also preserves, in its 27-month mint, a precise market document: a Factory release that opened in the post-peak November 2021 cooldown and took until February 2024 to close, with the AB5D collection buying in during the long middle.⁶

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 0.15 ETH is recorded.¹
• No interview or statement specific to Swing beyond the artist's project page was located; the registry interview field is empty.¹
• The February 2024 completion block of 32 mints ends a two-year near-silence; whether the artist or the platform promoted the final mint-out is not documented in inspected sources.⁶
• Trait attributions (line color, corners) for individual tokens are visual readings confirmed against the script's percentage logic, not recomputed from the hashes.⁴