Certificate of an unstable work

This site is not a catalogue of finished objects. It is the working record of something still being made, and the record is the part that lasts.

The poems are permanent. All 154 transbliterations are written. They are kept as text, under version control, and they do not change when the pictures do. Where the drafts survive, they are kept too — a poem here can be scrubbed back through its own making, into the language it was obliterated into and out the other side.

The images are provisional. Every sculpture on this site is one accepted render among several. A sonnet gets restyled and its images are replaced; nothing is lost, because the image was never the work. The instruction was. 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 published from there. What is versioned is the text and the prompt.

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 is a line under suspicion. One line of Sonnet I is not in the book because its sculptures came out as rats.

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 printed, by a technology that is not ready. Empty plinths are not placeholders for a page still under construction. They are the accurate part.

The state of the work

Poems written

154 of 154

Poems published here

4

With sculpture

4

With a draft genealogy

1

Sculptures modelled in 3D

24

Sculptures in the eventual park

~1,500

Acres acquired

0 of ~60

Currently showing

Each poem's imagery is one accepted run. Swapping a run replaces every image on that page; this table says which one you are looking at today.