August 2026

On running a program once

Generative work has a strange relationship with abundance. The program can make a thousand pictures before lunch, and so the temptation is to show a thousand, or to let the viewer press a button and make their own. I did that for a while. Nobody, including me, looked at any of them for longer than a second.

So now the rule is: one run. I pick a seed the way a photographer picks a frame — by looking at a lot of them and being ruthless — and then the program is done. I don't keep it running. I don't publish the source. The picture has to stand on its own, like a print from a negative that no longer exists.

It's a small discipline but it changed what I make. When there is only going to be one, you start caring about the margins, the paper, whether the lines at the edge feel finished. A thousand pictures don't have edges.

Current was the first piece made this way. It took forty seeds to find. The other thirty-nine are gone.