Particularly challenging while reading were the passages about the recent success of conservationists in the Gulf of Mexico in creating habitat for oysters (The book was published in late 2009). We are hurtling past the critical point where we need to evaluate how we are shaping the world. Our farms produce more than food, and our factories produce more than products. They create ecologies. At present, they aren’t ecologies which we fit into. The Living Shore presents a past shoreline ecology which we likely cannot return to. Hopefully we will be able to create something similarly robust.

I recently finished reading “non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity” by Marc Augé. The book, recommended to me by Peter Lunenfeld, positions itself within anthropological thought and then uses that position to look at how we encounter, interpret, and analyze space.

My experience of the book was fragmentary; I read sections as I rode the bus, occasionally being forced to stop mid-sentence when I reached the last stop. This seemed like an appropriate way to encounter the material. As I passed through places marked only by signs, I was reading about their demarcation, the way they function as non-relational space. Unfortunately, it prevented me from effectively noting sections of the book; any attempt at writing was thwarted by the irregular vibrations of the bus. I’ll try to piece together some of the elements that interested me while I read, centered around the production of meaning for researchers and individuals.

The early portion of the book is dedicated to how anthropologists define the group which they are studying. Somehow, a relation between all group members must be found through discrete samples. This is no simple task, and takes consideration of the representativeness of sources and their reliability. Augé describes this world-building elegantly:

The field ethnologist’s activity throughout is the activity of a social surveyor, a manipulator of scales … [s]he cobbles together a significant universe by exploring intermediate universes at need. (Augé, 13)

All experience is fragmentary, and all places unfinished. Augé discusses this as a challenge when considering anthropological subjects, for cultures “never constitute finished totalities” and individuals “are never quite simple enough to become detached from the order that assigns them a position: they express its totality only from a certain angle.” (Augé, 22) We encounter the world as individuals, and we can present it to others only from our individual perspective. This presentation is one of the possible roles for an artist or maker. To establish a way for others to see the world from a new perspective, although they will not move entirely outside themselves.

A method for artists to present their world is suggested in the methods ethnologists use to discover worlds around them: the creation of intermediate universes, each of which clarifies some portion of the whole. This creation of universes can be used as a strategy for individual works, or thought of as a way of looking at an established artist’s ouvre. As a strategy for making work, I think it may be useful to consider the exhibition as a “significant universe” and the piece in it as intermediate ones. While the pieces all corroborate some whole, the gaps between them must be inferred by the audience. Viewers essentially study this universe and construct their own vision of what binds it together. I would also like to explore the possibility of creating a series of islands that inform each other, worlds in miniature, that constitute a single piece.

There are obviously many other facets of this short collection of essays. Eventually, I might like to take on the necessity of individual production of meaning as a reaction to the instability of collective reference points. Also, the notion of online locations as anthropological places, and how they exist as dynamic spaces theoretically without spatial borders, is worth addressing. Regarding online places, why is it that social networking sites don’t feel like they have a history when we return to them?

I am left with many questions right now, so I’ll include a few of them here: How do we create meaning for ourselves? How can we create spaces for the production of meaning? Places that are ready to be seeded with memories and relations.

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. (Solnit, 13)

My current work is a continuous attempt at representing the world as I remember and imagine it to be. It is about the places I have been and the places I wish to inhabit, with plenty of diversions along the way. There is the hope that the experience of the work translates into a similar or new personal meaning for people who engage with it.

To that end, I am interested in creating new personal spaces in our world. Spaces where people can explore. Spaces where people can meditate. Spaces where people can play. Spaces to feel safe in. To bring the mountain vista to the gallery space, the forest trail to the sidewalk, and in so doing create a new kind of interconnected space. I see my work simultaneously running counter to and parallel to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. In opposition, I am often using representational elements from my experience; In parallel, I create concrete conditions of possible ways of being. My central concern is not representation, but creation of worlds or, more accurately, their fragments. In order to explore ways of making meaning, I will look at artists creating dream spaces in sculpture, digital media, and hybrid forms.

This idea of making concrete interventions is central to Bourriaud’s argument in support of relational aesthetics. The primary concern of the work “is not a matter of representing angelic worlds, but of producing the conditions thereof.” (Bourriaud, 83) So, rather than giving someone an image of this or another world, we are attempting to create that world in our present space. This creation may be small or temporary, but its existence as a real way of being is nevertheless significant.

What, then, are these angelic worlds?

The angelic worlds that Bourriaud relates are not necessarily the ones I am interested in (or ones I would consider angelic). Perhaps it is better to consider them as alternative worlds, or dream worlds. They are places “where reality and dream form a whole.” (Bachelard, 23) I want the interstitial elements that I create to allow people “to recapture the naïve wonder we used to feel when we found a nest,” to become comfortable dreaming in their daily lives (Bachelard, 93). Different manifestations of these dream-worlds include the man-machine hybrid, technologically-mediated nature, and my interest,

The spaces for reflection and discovery I aim to create are modeled around the spaces where I reflect on and discover the world. They are landscapes and cities of my imagination. They are pieces of music that play over and over in my head, and the places where I learned them.

These, for me, are dreams of interconnectedness and liminal spaces. Dreams of being simultaneously apart from and in touch with the world. I want to create scenarios where we can see the other world and reach out to touch it, experiencing the journey without going far.

I walk often, as it is how I generally form the strongest association with a place. It is not merely that I am walking, or the place that I am in, but the engagement of all senses with that place. The physical exertion needed to climb a mountain bolsters the view in validating its summit. Wandering and discovery are important themes in my work, even as the landscapes themselves are transposed/mediated, made into objects and made portable.

As I wander, I sometimes dream of occupying Bachelard’s image of rootedness and interconnectedness, “the undergrounds of legendary fortified castles, where mysterious passages that run under the enclosing walls, the ramparts and the moat put the heart of the castle into communication with the distant forest” (Bachelard, 20). Not of leaving the world behind, but being in a vast interconnected state. Of being at home, and simultaneously everywhere.

How do we form these worlds?

The importance of abstraction

These worlds should be expressed obliquely, leaving room for explorative, imaginative and emotional responses. We cannot simply say, “there is a forest,” and expect that statement to engage the imagination. As Bachelard writes (concerning the image of a snail retreating like a girl being teased): “Images that are too clear … become generalities, and for that reason block the imagination. We’ve seen, we’ve understood, we’ve spoken” (Bachelard, 121).

Rather than tell people what they should experience (or show them mere photographic evidence of my experience), I want to direct them to a memory. To give them “an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.” (Bachelard, 13) The secret, in the case of my work, is my own, deeply subjective, experience. It cannot be extracted from that subjectivity, and so can only be hinted at through equally subjective signs and directions. The artwork of these directions provides a place for discovering memories or dreams that inspired the work, and for new dreams and imaginings engendered by the work.

Building on land

Numerous artists create spaces that leave room for the imagination to complete them, to fill in the network,. I am interested in their works that present a vision of another way of being, and enable us to experience it directly or through the work as proxy.

A High Plane by Katrin Sigursdottir is a simple installation with a strong effect of collapsing distances, shown at PS1 in 2007. Entering the room, visitors are confronted by two ladders rising up through small holes in the ceiling. At the top, after climbing eighteen feet, the visitor enters a new space. An expansive ice floe in miniature surrounds the viewer’s head, as if she is just surfacing from the ocean. This is the type of interconnectedness embodied by the fantastical cellar: the visitor is simultaneously in the gallery and playfully elsewhere.

James Turrell’s Meeting Room, also at PS1, has a similar effect of bringing the outside world into the present space. It is a small room with seating around the outside which is opened to viewers at sunset. The ceiling has been cut away, such that there is a crisp white edge that meets the sky, making the plane of blue sky level with the white-painted ceiling.

David Altmejd creates sculptural dioramas of fantastical worlds. As Sigursdottir and Turrell bring imagined or outside space into familiar, interior spaces, Altmejd’s work brings the larger world into the interior of the imaginary body. These sculptures play with the body as landscape. They include worlds living in the crystallized bodies of dead beasts and tiny civilizations built around the hairy flesh of giants. He collapses space so far that we are not inside a new liminal space, but instead show us that the new space can be inside us, as it is inside the bodies he constructs. They are worlds we might create when we are dead, but which we do not yet participate in.

Building in the clouds

Work in non-physical spaces faces a different set of problems from those of physical objects and provides new opportunities. We rely almost exclusively on the sense of sight in most of our virtual worlds. (Interfaces are starting to shift away from this anemic sensory experience, as I will discuss below.) Despite the limitation to visual and auditory output, many artists are creating engaging work on the internet and in screen-space in general.

Many independent games give the player the opportunity to explore alternative, seemingly impossible, worlds. The pixeljunk series allows players to experience existence as life-giving plankton growing a digital menagerie on their screens through a series of balletic encounters with corals. Flower from That Game Company lets the player journey through a world experiencing the daydreams of a flower. Aether presents a similar kind of journey, inviting the player to move casually from planet to planet by swinging from clouds.

The work of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar takes some of the playfulness of these games and charges it with the somewhat more serious task of representing people’s emotions as gathered from blogs and chatrooms. As it brings together information from disparate places into our brightly-colored playground, “We Feel Fine” begins to create new interconnected spaces online. It provides a window onto thousands of other worlds from within our own. While one can argue that web-browsers in general provide this window, projects like “We Feel Fine” do so with meaningful intent and poetic framing.

Bridging the ether and matter

One of the pragmatic aspects of digital practice is that information can be infinitely developed, recycled, and reproduced in various contexts… (Paul, 70)

By working in digital media, we can move seamlessly between a range of representations. Its malleability aids greatly in bridging the gap between the physical and the ether, since bits can be at once an image, a sound, and translated into physical form. Using this range of outputs afforded by digital media, we can give feedback to nearly all the senses: creating motion, temperature, light, sound, and modulating each in time.

Eddo Stern’s Dark Game puts the player in a world where they have new haptic senses and are occasionally deprived of senses they may be accustomed to using in gaming. When sight is taken away, the player is given a haptic sense of where their objectives are located. Similarly, other senses are traded throughout gameplay.

Ear Studio’s Listening Post, on the other hand, brings the world of information into physical space but without gaining any warmth—it consists of an array of LCD screens and speakers. They display information gleaned from chatrooms in a series of movements.

Both of these works have a particularly digital affect. They are about their digital materiality more than their dual materiality. I am interested in pushing digital work to have a more material affect. I think work can engage the digital world as much as these pieces while entering the physical world more materially. Work that is successful in doing this will come succeed in the realms of both traditional object-making and digital artifact making.

You can bring it with you

Rather than requiring a physical presence for these effects, I am interested in how the conditions of those spaces can be created through the limited means we can carry with us or encounter in our everyday.

Portable screens are now pedestrian, and provide a pedestrian way to create portable environments. They confine the added experience to a small area, but give the carrier a sense of control over the experience. They are larger than it, can turn it off at any moment. But they can also turn it on wherever they are, which is these small screens’ strength. The screens become personal spaces by virtue of being small and being controlled by the people carrying them. They present an excellent stage for carrying out small interventions.

A synthesis of cult and exhibition value

Walter Benjamin talks of two traditional poles for the function of artwork: cult value and exhibition value. In other words, the value of the artwork as an object of the imaginary versus its value as an object that is seen. (Benjamin, 225) With the internet, the art original seems to take on the role of a cult object, as only its documentation may be seen by a larger audience. There are so many representations that serve to exhibit the work, but the idea of the existence of the original that makes it important. The cult value is no less important now, for the existence of the object suggests other life possibilities, other ways of being and using objects. The documentation provides exhibition value, but the existence of the object gives proof that, “…artists invent ways of living, or else create an awareness … making it possible to imagine a further state of our civilisation.” (Bourriaud, 71) While I think that artwork may suggest a better world, I take a more tempered view than Bourriaud on the work’s efficacy in bringing about that better world. Instead, I see artwork more as a placeholder marking our desire for something better.

The artworks discussed above are not merely about exhibition for their formal value. They are inherently concerned with their cult value—their ability to transform immediate reality. It is not about changing the whole world, but about changing one moment, imbuing it with new possibilities for living. It is a new kind of romanticism enabled by technology that lets us extend visionary drawings into physical space.

Some of this may not be true

I want to create work that creates the kind of interconnected scenarios I have discussed so far. Recently, I have been engaged with work that creates personal moments online and objects that transform experiences of the natural world and bring them into our more immediate domesticated environment.

My first serious attempt at creating personal spaces happened online, at timespentalone.com. It consists of a series of interactive scenes conceived in solitude and intended for display and participation in the isolated social space of the internet. I consider each scene to be a daydream, worry or solitary trip.

I subsequently created Portable Forest, a jacket that creates a sonic forest around the wearer that becomes denser as they zip up the jacket. Not a space for reflection so much as an opportunity to change the space one is in, transforming it into a new kind of hybrid natural space, in which experiences in our urban environment are overlaid with experiences pulled from the natural environment. Perhaps it allows us to imagine a future state—one I certainly hope for—where we have attained a fusion between our constructed habitat and our natural one. I am currently developing the next step in the project, a forest that lives on the viewer’s cellphone, and provides a level of natural environment commensurate with the person’s current need for nature. That is, there will be more simulated forest at hand when you are farthest from an actual forest.

Desert I & II diverge from this idea of creating spaces, but attempt to provoke similar emotional responses. A concrete ground that floats just above the one we stand on and a circle of miniature trees growing from salt, they present a memory of the natural world that is contrary to expectations about that world. They are a response to and re-asking of the questions I had when I first encountered trees bearing salt.

My work, then, is in process. Each piece I make is an attempt at relating some of my experiences or my hopes for new experiences we may have. As the physical and digital systems we live in grow increasingly sophisticated and widespread, I hope to tell more sophisticated stories, and to tell simple ones more effectively.

Bibliography

1. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
2. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Random House, 2007.
3. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002.
4. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
5. Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
6. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2001.

My brother was in town a few weeks ago and we stopped by the Hammer to check out the work by Chen Qiulin. Chen’s work is obliquely documentary; recording some of the now-submerged cities and valleys of Sichuan, China through video of narratives enacted on the condemned landscapes.

Of primary interest to me in Chen’s work is how she presents the landscape as defining the events within it. Collapsing industrial buildings tower over people, shaping the actions they may take. It seems as if all they can do is wander through the landscape, searching for each other, searching for meaning in their actions. Indeed, they can do nothing to shape the land around them, or to prevent its disappearance. And we can only watch as they progress down a linear path.

I wonder how software and installation can be used to represent landscapes as charged as these, how they can engage viewers in ritual similar to those enacted by the actors/demonstrators in Qiulin’s work. Can we guide people through the environment as effectively as the bride and groom in Qiulin’s videos? Perhaps we need some sense of inevitability in our work; to see an the next step coming, even as we aren’t sure of what it is.

In Qiulin’s video, we follow the actors as they walk the path of their fate. In games, we may need a guide to help us, perhaps we are one of the many men carrying peonies to the lake, and so instinctively stay with the group. In an environment, we can limit pathways, like presenting viewers with a staircase leading up to an unknown plane. At what point do these constraints become meaningful, and how do they shape the narrative for the viewer?

This issue of imbuing work with substantive meaning or context is one I will be tackling in future writings. Simply using a dataset to create an image does not make the image about that data. A higher level of transformation is occurring in successful work, a level which I am trying to reach in my own practice.

Salt

The first thing that struck me in the desert was the salt-tree in front of our campsite. The tree—a tamarisk—had large crystals of salt coating its leaves.

Salt manifests wherever there is water in the desert, and plants growing in oases need to be halophilic to survive. I am interested in systems where halophiles could be operating benevolently on behalf of less salt-tolerant species, and in the exoskeleton that the halophiles produce as they grow under mineral-rich conditions.

Journey

Scrambling from rock to rock in Joshua Tree National Monument cemented the desire Pete Hawkes and I had to make the journey integral to some of our work. Michael Kimmelman’s essay on The Art of the Pilgrimage brings up how travel to see a work shapes your perception of the work; I think the travel itself could become the work. What better way to share a steep mountain climb than to lead someone on it? Naturally, we would like to have some additional payoff, some tangible work that people who engage in the travel ultimately contribute to. We’re working out the details.

Zombichrucians

Let’s not forget the crazies who live out in the desert, or the artists who impersonate crazies in the desert. Christmas-tree-like light-up crosses, keep-out signs, and ringing church bells that don’t belong to you. The bells peal loudly in the desert, trailing off into the open space, never bouncing back. Someone else hears and we all scramble for the car. It doesn’t start for a minute that feels much longer, when we finally drive off into the space, becoming a glowing light on the horizon.

More images from the weekend are available on flickr.

Online art is inherently public art. It exists on the internet, that virtual space is where many people spend the majority of their time (Dangerous words in there; this ain’t journalism). Just as we beautify the public spaces we walk past on our way to work, we should beautify the virtual space that we visit in between trips to productive/useful web sites and applications. It’s not that we always notice the park or sculpture on our way to the office, but that we have the option to stop and appreciate it.

The obvious challenge in all of this is knowing who should fund public works in a space so public it operates largely without regulation. Internet service providers could fund unique works. 2% of their expenses could go enhancing the quality of the content they provide access to. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that AT&T or Comcast actually cares about the things they’re bringing in to your home (not in an anti-net-neutrality way)? Maybe cities should promote the online work of their residents. Physical-world tie-ins bind the content of the online works to a specific place, making the work more meaningful when you visit the city. I would be happier to run across more engaging personal content online that encourages me to visit a new city than to see a Mark Di Suvero sculpture when I get there. Or perhaps an independent entity should be formed, a branch of the NEA (miserably underfunded as it is) or UNESCO.

Yeah, making the work is not about money. However, if making artwork for the internet (or anywhere) began to at least fund itself, it would make thinking about money less critical. Right now, everything is decidedly about indirect revenue streams. I have a day-job making commercial stuff for the internet as a result of spending my free time making my own work. The money I make allows me to pay to keep my personal sites up. Just imagine the quality of work people could produce if they didn’t need to hold down a day-job.

For a time now, I’ve been posting things on flickr, vimeo, this blog, twitter, archiving projects in various ways, and using tools like delicious and (recently) ffffound to keep track of things that come to me through the tubes. My stuff, like many other people’s, exists in a lot of places on the internet, and it became far too many to continue to tack onto an increasingly tall sidebar. So I stripped everything out (pretty much), and replaced it with a new website.

The goals of the new site–consolidation, clarification–are fairly obvious, although the need to build it myself isn’t. A number of other projects satisfy the need to bring a bunch of sources together. Lifestreaming services like SweetCron help to aggregate information. However, SweetCron, like many tools for aggregating/streaming information, is too focused on chronology as the criterion for determining hierarchy (not a problem for everyone, but tweets are less important to me than blog entries, and shouldn’t be allowed to bury them). FindMeOn, a service I’m not very familiar with, allows people to manage their identity across social networks and the internet as a whole. This seems awesome, but I wasn’t ready to join another service (where would it have gone in the sidebar?). By independently maintaining my web identity, I have more control over displaying what I think is important and organizing it as I see fit. If you’re interested in bringing together some of your web identities, but don’t quite love the thought of spending your free-time collecting all your things and sorting them yourself, I recommend giving either of the above services a try.

At this point, you should check out the new sansumbrella.com. I concurrently launched a new site to document my projects at projects.sansumbrella. Sketches, concept development, and finished work will be displayed there. I built it in part so I could grab a feed of selected work for the new main page. Having that dedicated site is already proving to be a more enjoyable way to keep track of things I’m making.

This site (things.sansumbrella), will continue to be a record of things I see, read, participate in, and otherwise experience.

I traveled to Boston this weekend for the Barbarian company meeting and holiday festivities. On Saturday, I went to the ICA to check out the Tara Donovan exhibition. The exhibition was fantastic, displaying a number of large installations by the artist. Each piece is constructed from multiples of a simple base object, with the overall forms being determined by the connection between pieces. Donovan’s work is instructive on many levels, some of which I’ll explore below.

When observed over time, in motion, or from different perspectives, each of Donovan’s work shifts and presents new sides of itself. Parallax and moiré effects are common in many of her pieces. Haze, a wall composed of drinking straws, has a few particularly interesting qualities. The regularly varying material opacity and hollow transparency combined with our limited field of view generates zones of darkness and light on Haze’s surface. The subtle compression of the straws as they push against one another causes subtle, crazed polygonal shapes to emerge within the darker areas.

The lack of obvious connectors between each object is curious. Many digital works share this absence of connection between components. What’s interesting about Donovan’s work is that it holds together despite the lack of connectors. In some cases, cups are stacked inside of other cups, or slabs of cracked glass are laid on atop the next. In others, the base material is the connector – many of the pieces are constructed from mylar tape. A lot of work is held in place by compression acting on the items from the walls of the room in which it is installed.

Each installation works on multiple levels of scale. Indeed, each installation exists on a large scale while being composed of relatively small items. Hundreds, if not thousands, of each building block are composed into the final piece. While some might claim that architecture inherently works in the same way, standard building materials lack the independent character of the things Donovan works with. This suggests the use of recognizable base forms in generative work, where the parts can be as meaningful as, and convey a separate meaning from, the whole.

The combined effect of these various attributes is that they often presented something of a puzzle for the viewers as they engage with Donovan’s work. People in the museum were delighted, and occasionally incredulous (especially with the paper plates), as they discovered what objects each installation was composed of, and to figured out how they were assembled. Perhaps part of the mystery of the pieces is how they can be so immediately powerful while being composed of such seemingly modest objects.

I can imagine a number of potential generative software pieces that would mimic Donovan’s assemblies. Existing purely in the software space, however, multiples of objects lack the impressive scale present in Donovan’s pieces. It would be possible to generatively develop systems of interlocking pieces and use rapid-prototyping or cnc milling technologies to produce thousands of the unique components. There would be an element of luxury involved. Despite that, proper material selection could render the objects more environmentally friendly than the commonly mass-produced items Donovan utilizes. Perhaps she would be interested in creating the objects from which her final pieces are constructed.

A number of other interesting pieces are on show, although they are eclipsed by Donovan’s work. One notable room is an ‘exploration of possibilities and problems’ concerning the Loch Ness monster. I hope to see similar presentations of less known, perhaps fictional, landscapes and phenomena in the future. As it stands, Loch Ness is a little too well known, and the presentation a little too sparse for my tastes.

I often project emotions onto inanimate forms, aspirations onto moving objects. What is the natural home for an interestingly spun wood shaving? Where are those blobs of goo headed, and what do they think of each other? Tonight, I’ve done it with a quick code sketch. The behaviors are purely overlaid on top of the still images after they’ve been taken. Some dots are rejected by others, sometimes they’re bustling to work, or a connection is made across the room. These are simple stories for simple images, and I don’t pretend that they are clearly evinced without narrator intervention.

The majority of systems overlaid with human characteristics are cute analogs (as above). What level of complexity must a system reach in order to signify human emotions with more resonance and less creator intervention? How can end viewers reach their own anthropomorphic conclusions about the piece that is within the creators intended parameters? A potential solution is the appropriate integration of language.

I have been considering the incorporation of language into my work more seriously since I saw the Lawrence Weiner retrospective at the Whitney. His work consists of a statement, which can be carried out literally or simply written or spoken. I like the writing of the intent of the piece, and its incorporation into the visual piece. The words, as they are written, can carry a specific weight. They are allowed to change within the readers mind, to be given new realizations parallel to the literal interpretations that are given. “Two Minutes of Spray Paint Directly Upon the Floor From a Standard Aerosol Spray Can” Titling alone cannot give appropriate meaning to a work, the object/symbol obviously needs to relate the message on its own. I have a project in the pipeline that I hope will address some of these concerns and enable me to be more expressive with my future making.

On my recent train ride to NYC from Boston, I began considering what it is that I’m trying to present to an audience. I was writing up an explanation for Transition, and had a hard time deciding whether to explain it as a software piece (which it is), or as a video piece (which it also is). I settled on describing it as an animation, since I am presenting it as a quicktime with fixed duration and music.

However, I also created the software system that made the animation. Do I want to distribute that? Is it more or less interesting to have a delimited work or a perpetually changing one?

Obviously, the distribution of one form doesn’t prevent distribution of the other, and they may be shown in a complimentary manner. The question for me is whether the essential characteristic of the work is its perpetual generation/development or if there is a single trajectory that can be distilled from what would otherwise be an endless exercise in form making.

Put in that way, a linear time-based piece seems the obvious desired outcome. But since the software can respond to any sound input, can’t it take on other trajectories, incorporating them into an endless series of short narratives throughout its lifespan?

I will be revisiting these ideas in the future, but I think the questions posed help to focus the discussion as it pertains to a particular piece of work. Was it made to tell a story? Does it facilitate the creation of separate, personal stories? Or does it express some other idea altogether?