Parameters

I have been making pictures out of algorithms since about 2012. For most of that time it was slow and physical work. You patched it by hand, you aimed two secondhand projectors at a wall, and you waited for the render. The 2013 piece at the top of this page took a room, a night, and a lot of cables to see once.

This show puts that work next to what I make now. The honest headline is that in the last year I finished more pieces than in the previous thirteen combined. I did not get thirteen times better. Something else changed, and this show is me looking straight at it rather than around it.

A parameter is a number that decides something on your behalf.

The title means both halves of that. Inside a model, the parameters are the weights — the numbers that settle what it will say before you ask. In a workshop, your parameters are the things you cannot argue with: what the material will take, what the battery will hold, how wide the container is. Both kinds decide things about you.

What makes this feel urgent rather than merely interesting is that the vocabulary has started running the other way. We built these systems by borrowing words for thinking — attention, memory, hallucination, reasoning — and now those words come back to us with machine meanings attached, and we use them on ourselves. The question is no longer whether a machine can be conscious. It is what happens to our account of our own minds once we have a working model that behaves like one.

There is a heart in this show rendered twice: once as a continuous surface of light, once reduced to seventy-eight flat triangles. Both are the same object. One of them is missing almost everything. Neither is the real one. I do not have a better way to say what I think is happening to us.

A parameter in the abstract is a connection, a number that decides before anything exists. This is the mind. The moment it meets material it becomes visceral. The machine bends what it can rather than what is possible in the mind. This is the body. The gap between them is the work. What returns from that encounter is neither the rule nor the object — what survived compression of the physical, what the making taught. This is the soul. The next parameter begins again in the mind.

The room is built to be walked this way. [/mind] and [/soul] face each other down the length of the container and [/body] closes the far end — so you walk in between the rule and its residue, arrive at the machine still running, and then turn around and walk back through the same two walls in the opposite order. The return trip is the point. Nothing here is a conclusion; it is a lap.

The container is a corridor: nineteen feet long, seven feet eight across. You do not stand back from anything in here. Each wall pairs early work against recent work, so the comparison happens in the room rather than in the wall text.

Counted from repository creation dates — a crude measure, but an honest one, and not one I can quietly reshape after the fact.

The bar at the bottom is the show. Everything above it is why that bar needs explaining.

Every dimension in the plan is real: a 20′ container measures 232 × 92 × 94 inches inside, and the works are placed at the heights they will actually hang. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, or walk the corridor from the door.