the spring begins with the first rainstorm

The work and its context

the spring begins with the first rainstorm is Art Blocks project 317 on the contract at 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, credited to Cole Sternberg. The index records 487 invocations against a maximum of 487, the runtime p5@1.0.0, an aspect ratio of 5:6, the Factory category, the licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 linked to the Creative Commons legal code, and the website thespringbegins.io ¹. The collection page calls it "An Art Blocks 500 release, in the Factory category", shows a fixed edition of 487 and lists thirteen attributes, from gestalt and compass to portal guidance ².

Each output is a still, portrait image. A dense field of fine, fibrous marks, like rays, bark or water-lit ripples, is rendered as a halftone of tiny dots over soft washes of colour. It is often rotated, sometimes mirrored or split, and often has a second, smaller copy set into it as a "portal" ¹³. The artist's statement calls the work "my merger of earthly patterning and digital dynamics", an attempt "to erase the human hand and glimpse into an environmental portal" ¹.

The project also had a physical side. The first 48 minters were to receive a "Genesis Edition": a signed print on archival etching paper mounted on maple, a serpentine rock collected by the artist at stated coordinates, and a signed, numbered compendium ¹⁴.

Conception and development

Sternberg's statement names his influences: falling into the fountains of the Louvre as a child and "sneaking past the guards to enter the glass temple dripping", Sigmar Polke's dispersion paintings, Joseph Beuys, Bas Jan Ader, Aldous Huxley and John Muir ¹. Several trait values are phrased like quotations: "to live is the rarest thing in the world", "a boisterous stream in a boulder-choked channel", "a fairyland created out of the commonest fern-stuff" ⁵. The statement gives none of their sources, and this package does not attribute them.

The statement explains the process for the central element: "I started with the pattern variable, this movement was first created by dragging large paintings through the ocean until my brushstrokes disappeared and the earth becomes the composer" ¹. The resulting movement "is akin to light fracturing through water, the bark of trees, or the skin of reptiles", and "When redacted into visible pixels it harkens to traditional screen-printing and a web 1.0 dream" ¹. The artist glosses three trait values: "'hibernal' as blizzards, 'maelstrom' as dreams of the deep water and the 'arboretum' as lush gardens". He describes the palette as "lavish watercolor washes" and the "smokey ribboning" as the winds ¹. The collection page thanks Rob Dixon "for all the help, guidance and support of this project" and records that "10% of the Artist's net proceeds will be donated to a variety of human rights and sustainability charities" ².

The Genesis Edition page describes the physical set as "a physical manifestation of the mint itself", "reserved for the first 48 minters" ⁴.

How the work was constructed

The program is 43 script parts that concatenate to 477,754 bytes, SHA-256 300e6c32c61879118bbb637d573b59bf93b130e6c2e6c4ab8d5df7496b0ac261 ¹. The renderer serves the same bytes and loads p5.js from a public CDN ³. Nearly all of the size is data. Eleven base64-encoded PNG images, each 288 by 346 pixels, account for about 464,000 bytes. When decoded and viewed they are grayscale scans of streaked, fibrous marks: rays fanning from an edge, feathered strokes, crossed scratches ¹³. They are presumably the "pattern variable" of the statement, though the program does not label them. The code itself, about 13,700 bytes once the images are set aside, was read in full, together with its colour and layout tables. No code is reproduced here.

Randomness comes from a four-word xorshift generator seeded from hash characters 5 to 36, with eleven draws discarded and one used to seed Perlin noise ¹. Forty-four tokens are set by hand rather than by chance. Every eleventh invocation from 0 to 473 is assigned a pattern and an arrangement by its position: mirrored left to right, plain, or mirrored and turned half round, always with a curated palette and no inset ¹⁵. The last group of eleven sets a half turn and the mirrored arrangement together, but the mirrored arrangement also fixes the image upright, so on a reading of the code these tokens are drawn upright although their compass trait reads "true south" ¹⁵. This was not checked in the renderer. For all other tokens the program chooses in turn a pattern and a rotation. It then chooses either a split with a second pattern (16 per cent) or a checkerboard of inverted cells of 2, 4, 8 or 16 divisions (15 per cent). Then come a 70 per cent chance of an inset portal, a chance of mirroring, a palette source, a blend mode, a dither threshold, a wind strength, a layout for the colour washes, and an underpainting switch ¹.

The image is built in layers. Six colours, each at an alpha of 7 out of 255, are laid down as thousands of overlapping ellipses at one of fourteen preset layouts or a random one. A smaller share of tokens get fine horizontal gradient stripes instead. These are the "watercolor washes" ¹. Unless the wind strength is zero, white ellipses at an alpha of 2 are dragged along a noise flow field to make the smoky ribbons ¹. The chosen pattern is decoded, scaled to 864 by 1,038, split or mirrored as chosen, and converted to pure black and white with a 4-by-4 ordered dither. The black dots become opaque and the white ones transparent ¹. The dot layer is then rotated, enlarged just enough to cover the corners, and composited over the washes in one of three ways: hard light, hard light with the dots inverted to white, or difference with the dots inverted. The inset portal is a smaller copy of the same dot layer, turned with or against the main rotation and blended again ¹. The program draws once. The 'p' key re-renders at 3,000 by 3,600 CSS pixels, 6,000 by 7,200 at the renderer's pixel density, and 's' saves a PNG ¹³. There is no sound ¹³.

A reimplementation of the choice sequence reproduces all thirteen published traits on 486 of the 487 tokens ⁵. gestalt names the pattern; gestalt echo the second pattern in a split; gestalt frequency the split, checkerboard or mirroring mode ("totems", "mitosis" to "the machine is learning", "sunrise" and "sunset" reflections and confrontations). coverage names the compositing mode: maelstrom for plain hard light, hibernal for hard light with white dots, arboretum for difference. compass bins the rotation into eight directions, with the hand-set tokens labelled "true north" or "true south". wind covers zero ("eye"), light ("breeze") and strong ("gust") ribbons. The portal traits give the inset's size, turn and blend ⁵. The exception is token 317000295: ten of its thirteen published traits disagree with the program. The live render sides with the program (see Close reading) ⁵³.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 30 May 2022 at 22:29:25 UTC, before the index's activation on 2 June at 00:35:01 UTC ⁵¹. The recorded start is 10 June 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, which the collection page shows as 11 June in a browser ten hours ahead ¹². The first public mint came at 17:06:39 UTC. Invocation 47, the forty-eighth token, was minted at 17:41:46, so if the Genesis Edition's "first 48 minters" were counted by invocation, they were all served within the first 42 minutes ⁵⁴. Fifty-five tokens existed after one hour, 80 after a day and 106 after a week, after which the pace slowed to a trickle. The last token was minted on 11 July 2022 at 14:40:38 UTC, which is also the recorded completion, almost 31 days after the start ⁵¹.

The index's current price field reads 0, and neither the collection page nor the project pages give a price, so the mint price is not documented in the sources inspected ¹²⁴. Whether invocation 0, minted before activation, counted among the 48 Genesis minters is not stated. At retrieval the 487 tokens were held by 228 addresses ⁵.

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and links to the legal code, not the summary deed ¹. The legal code grants a licence to "reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only" and to "produce and reproduce, but not Share, Adapted Material for NonCommercial purposes only" ⁶. The images may be shared non-commercially with attribution. Adaptations may be made for private non-commercial use but not shared. Commercial use needs separate permission ⁶. This is the most restrictive licence in this batch.

The licence covers the digital work. The Genesis Edition prints, rocks and compendiums are physical objects whose terms are not stated in the sources inspected ⁴. The program carries no licence statement for the code or for the embedded pattern images, so their separate terms are unknown ¹.

Close reading of examples

Four tokens were rendered side by side in the official renderer on the generator's own origin, with the browser pane displayed, and reloaded to check that the renders repeat ⁷³. The eleven embedded patterns were also decoded and viewed side by side in the browser, so that each render could be matched to its source image ³. The examples cover the AB5D holding, a hand-set token using the same pattern, a checkerboard token, and the token whose published traits disagree with the program.

the spring begins with the first rainstorm #122 (token 317000122, held by an address in the AB5D linked-wallet set ⁸) uses the pattern labelled "a boisterous stream in a boulder-choked channel". It is turned southeast, with a modest inset portal turned the same way ("twinning") and blended in overlay ("disparate realities"), a hard-light blend ("maelstrom") and no wind ("eye") ⁷. It was observed for about a minute. It renders as dense green feathered strokes streaming diagonally across a near-black ground, dissolving into a dotted halftone, with a brown wash in the lower corner ³. It drew in about two seconds, then held. A reload reproduced the identical signature, cfe31368 ³. Pressing 'p' re-rendered it on a 6,000 by 7,200 pixel canvas with the same mean colour, 22, 55, 37. A second 'p' returned it to screen size ³.

the spring begins with the first rainstorm #33 (token 317000033) is one of the 44 hand-set tokens, invocation 33. It uses the same pattern as #122, mirrored left to right ("sunrise reflection"), upright ("true north"), with no portal ⁷⁵. On screen the feathered strokes are dark blue and violet on black. They rise symmetrically from the bottom edge like a fountain or a fern, and the mirror line runs down the centre ³. Beside #122 it shows how much the arrangement changes a single scan.

the spring begins with the first rainstorm #202 (token 317000202) is one of four "the machine is learning" tokens: a sixteen-by-sixteen checkerboard of inverted cells over the "algae exploration" pattern, in the "hibernal" mode with white dots ⁷⁵. It reads as a pale ice-blue and teal grid of alternating light and dark squares, each carrying a fragment of the streaked texture ³.

the spring begins with the first rainstorm #295 (token 317000295) is published as pattern "not their sky vortex" split with a second pattern ("totems"), facing north, with a judicious hard-light portal ⁷. The program instead gives the pattern "to live is the rarest thing in the world", turned 32 degrees, with no split and a generous overlay portal ⁵. The render shows a single continuous field of gold rays converging on a point near the upper right, over dark brown and violet, with a faint rectangular inset ³. Among the decoded patterns, "to live is the rarest thing" is the one with rays converging on the top edge, while "not their sky vortex" fans up from the bottom ³. The image therefore matches the program, not the metadata.

None of the four made sound or changed after drawing ³.

Significance and limitations

The work stands out in this batch for carrying photographic source material on chain. Eleven scans, presumably of the artist's ocean-worked paintings, make up almost all of its 478 kilobytes, and the program reworks them into dithered, screen-print-like images over generated washes ¹³. It also combined the on-chain edition with a physical Genesis Edition for the first 48 minters, and it set aside 44 hand-arranged tokens within the random edition ⁴⁵.

The metadata is accurate for 486 of 487 tokens. For one token the published traits describe a different image from the one the program draws ⁵³. The price and the physical fulfilment of the Genesis Edition are not documented in the sources inspected.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Why do the published traits for token 317000295 disagree with the program, and has the metadata been corrected anywhere?
2. What was the mint price?
3. Were the Genesis Edition sets delivered, and did invocation 0 count among the 48?
4. Are the eleven embedded images scans of the ocean-dragged paintings, and under what terms may they be reproduced separately from the tokens?