Nothing here was drawn.
Eight algorithms hold this room. They begin computing when you arrive, from a number that belongs to your visit and to no other. The work behind this text did not exist before you loaded the page.
It will not survive your leaving either, unless you keep the number. The number is at the top of the screen, and it is also in the address bar.
The hang
Eight systems, printed live. Hover a plate for its rule. Open it for its parameters, its seed, and a file you can keep.
Determinism as medium
the first 34 draws of mulberry32, seeded
It continues like this for four billion numbers before it repeats, and it prints in this order on every machine that asks. Nothing above was chosen. It was drawn.
A seed is a small integer. Feed it to a pseudo-random generator and you get a stream of numbers that looks like chance and behaves like law: unpredictable in advance, identical on every repetition. Every decision in this gallery, every particle release, every tile rotation, every chemical blot, is drawn from that stream and from nothing else.
This has an awkward consequence for anyone who wants to talk about authorship. We did not choose where the circles went. We chose the rule that decides where circles can go, and then we chose a number. The number did the rest, and the number was not ours either.
What is left to an artist under those conditions is the specification: the grammar, the feed and kill rates, the odds a walker keeps going straight. It is a narrow instrument and it is the only one on the table. The plate is a consequence, and consequences are not signed.
So the seed is the work's provenance. Not a certificate stapled to the object, but the object's actual cause, small enough to say out loud. Read the one below, put it in the address bar of any machine on earth, and that machine will print this exhibition again, to the pixel, in about four seconds.
this visit:
The same number, printed twice
Two canvases, one seed, computed independently in this browser. Press verify and the pair is composited in difference mode: every pixel becomes the distance between the two plates. If the claim on this page is true, the result is black.
Editions
The edition is the number. You acquire a seed; the plate is printed from it, on paper, at size. The file remains free and always will be, which is either the whole point or an unforgivable business decision.
The three plates below are printed here, now, from the numbers in their own rows, and they do not change with your visit. Put one of those numbers in the address bar and the room upstairs will hang that edition instead of yours.
plate 00, at 1:1 of the file ED.010x1C4A07Field Studies
after Prevailing Weather
- process
- Pigment print, 11 greys
- sheet
- Somerset Satin 300gsm
- size
- 560 x 700 mm
- edition
- 40 + 6 AP
- available
- 27 of 40
GBP 420enquireplate 01, at 1:1 of the file ED.020x9B2F51Chemistry, Reluctant
after Turing, Reluctantly
- process
- Screenprint, 2 inks, hand pulled
- sheet
- Fabriano Rosaspina 285gsm
- size
- 700 x 700 mm
- edition
- 25 + 4 AP
- available
- 6 of 25
GBP 780enquireplate 07 of the eight in the box ED.030x0000FFThe Low Seeds
after the complete hang, eight plates
- process
- Pigment print, portfolio box
- sheet
- Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm
- size
- 8 x 420 x 520 mm
- edition
- 12 + 2 AP
- available
- 12 of 12
GBP 3,150enquire
Colophon
PROVENANCE shows work that has no original. Each plate is computed in the visitor's own browser, at the moment of viewing, at whatever size the window happens to be. There is no master file on a server here waiting to be served. There is a specification, and there is your number.
The gallery takes the position that this is not a diminished way to own a thing. A painting is a record of a process that has ended. These are the process, still running, and the seed is a complete and honest description of it: eight characters that reconstitute the entire room on any machine, forever, at no cost.
| systems | 8, hand written |
|---|---|
| surface | Canvas2D, no WebGL |
| randomness | mulberry32, seeded |
| images | none, at any point |
| typeface | Space Mono, Uncut Sans |
| authorship | the specification only |