Certificate of an unstable work

Everything on this site is synced to work in progress: the poems, images, sculptures, readings, videos and the garden, each moving at its own pace.

The poems are all written. All 154 transbliterations were written years ago as described in /history/. They are kept as text, under version control, and are occasionally modified in reaction to the images, sculptures, audio and video they inspire. As shown on the landing page, Sonnet I can be stepped through the drafts of its creation.

Twenty of the 154 are shown here. The other 134 are named, placed and measured on /sonnets/ — their titles, their Parts, the sonnets they answer, their lengths, and an image of a potential sculpture. They too are in flux but are not available on this site.

Everything is provisional. To keep the website performant, only five of the smallest file-size renderings are shown, of the dozens currently being considered. Those dozens have already been narrowed down from thousands of prompt-and-style experiments, and the ones kept are simply the ones that survived being looked at. Every sculpture on this site is therefore one accepted render among many. The narrowing is in progress and this site will be re-synced when the next round is done. Some styles may disappear, new ones emerge, or current ones will get an additional sculpture on a plinth.

What is versioned is the text and the prompt. None of the artwork is committed to the repository that holds this site — it is regenerated, it lives on one machine and in a Drive folder, and it is synced from there.

The traffic runs both ways. The prompts abstract the poems, and the drift is recorded line by line. But the renders also edit backwards: a line that comes out badly in image, sculpture, video or audio is a line that should be rethought.

The text of the poems has never been changed by a language model. All 154 were finished years before LLMs arrived and any changes are described above. Each image prompt starts from a line, or lines, of the poem, adapted by hand. Every other field (period, material, adjectives, background, light, image qualities, shape) comes from a genetic algorithm, written by the author, which steers the next iteration based on what he kept from the last. The only text here that no person wrote is Google’s 2010 Spanish, and that is raw material rather than product. There is one exception: on /analysis/, an AI model read all 4,005 lines against their sonnets, and the line labels and the short reading of each poem are its work.

The voice is 36% the artist’s. The poems are read by a speaker who does not exist. After extensive “auditions”, a voice was chosen that is a blend of the artist’s own recorded clips and two other shipped synthetic voices. Everything you hear is a clone of that blend, synthesized one line at a time to reflect indentation depth, and every line of it carries the synthesizer’s inaudible watermark.

The technology is constantly improving. Every step of the process, after the poems themselves, relies on techniques that exist today, but may be supplanted tomorrow.

The votes are another input. Every sculpture here can be liked or rejected. The votes will influence decisions about which sculptures get built. A vote belongs to one sculpture — one line of one poem in one rendering — so a favourite is a particular object rather than a style. It is designed to be anonymous and easy to give, based on a random number from the browser with no login.

The garden does not exist yet. The sculpture garden on this site is a maquette for roughly sixty acres that have not been bought, holding roughly fifteen hundred sculptures that have not been 3D-printed, by a technology that is not yet capable. Even the maquette is unfinished: the ledger below counts the plinths still bare in these twenty poems, and filling them, after rounds and rounds of judgments, will likely take another year or two. Empty plinths are there to reflect the current state.

The state of the work

Poems written

154 of 154

Poems shown here

20

With sculpture

20

With a draft genealogy

1

Poems read aloud

20

Renderings shown

96, five per poem for all but two

Sculptures in 3D

836, across every rendering

Plinths still bare

43 of 218 in these twenty

Sculptures in the eventual park

~1,500

Acres acquired

0 of ~60

Which one you meet first

Every poem here is shown in several renderings and this table names only one of them: the run its page opens on when you go straight to the poem, and the one it falls back to with JavaScript switched off. Walk in through the garden instead and it deals you one of the five at random, so the sculptures you pass are unlikely to be these. The rest are a click away on the poem itself.