Recursions: Early Ordinals, Cut Into Collage
Billy Restey's Recursions turns early Ordinals inscriptions into 300 abstract collages, each a tiny recursive file on Bitcoin.
Billy Restey built Recursions out of Bitcoin's own past. The 300-piece Ordinals collection, inscribed in May 2025 at block 895,406, takes imagery from early inscriptions and arranges it into new compositions. Restey describes it as an algorithmic collection that "reconstructs early Ordinals into abstract collage."
The starting point was a visit to the Picasso museum during NFT Paris. "I wanted to create something raw, but digital," he writes. He admits he first saw early inscriptions as "crude, lazy, pixelated garbage" before coming around: "I now view them as historic artifacts by pioneers to be celebrated for years to come."
The collection runs on recursion, the Ordinals technique that lets one inscription load others. Each piece is a small HTML file that calls code already stored on Bitcoin, so all 300 works take up only 45 kilobytes on chain. They were inscribed on 300 uncommon sats in a single transaction, with parent and child provenance. Restey generated thousands of outputs and kept his 300 favorites, a deliberate change from BitBlocks and Fusion, where minters chose their own results.
Restey has been inscribing on Bitcoin since 2023, and his work has been featured at Sotheby's and covered by WIRED. Recursions came after his Supercycle animations of January 2025 and before STRUCTURES, his newest generative collection.
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