Future Directions — Speculative Notes

What this page is. A holding area for the parts of the artist's thinking that are proposals for future work, not records of what has been made. These notes were extracted from The Generative Threshold so that page could remain a factual cross-cutting synthesis. The arguments below are speculative — they describe what would be possible, what would extend the practice, what hasn't yet been done. They are kept because the artist authored them as part of the synthesis; they are isolated here because they should not be read as accounts of existing work.

Four underdeveloped territories

Four territories are present in the work but underdeveloped, and they are the most philosophically consequential.

1. AI as the inversion of the generative threshold

AI (large generative models) represents a structurally different operation from the practice described in the rest of the wiki. Where the practice compresses a rule into a system and decompresses it into complexity, AI compresses a vast corpus of human output into statistical weights and decompresses on demand. The fitness function — the central conceptual object of the practice — is absent from AI: the model was trained to match its training distribution, not to maximize any aesthetic criterion.

The question is not whether AI is good or bad. It is whether AI-generated work crosses the threshold that the practice has been examining: is it "tested, not executed"? The Stained Unravel text identifies the irreplaceable element as the criterion — the artist's judgment about what the system should optimise for. AI does not have this. It can be steered, but it cannot be made to hold a criterion the way a fitness function holds one.

The specific opportunity this opens: a work in which AI is not the output but the fitness function itself — where a model learned from a curated corpus (the Dissociations vault) operates as the selection criterion for a generative system. The taste that the vault accumulated through twenty years of eliminations becomes the evaluator of the system's outputs. This would be the most radical version of the externalisation-of-taste trajectory described in Protocol, Taste, and Systems: not just encoding taste as a structural algorithm but learning taste from the accumulated record and deploying the learned representation as a formal criterion.

2. Knowledge breaking down as aesthetic program

The Struggle for Pleasure press release contains the sharpest claim in the corpus: "Simplicity of operation can become a window into territories of complexity where knowledge itself breaks down." This is stronger than emergence or unpredictability — it is a claim about aesthetics as epistemological disruption. The work can produce an experience at the limit of comprehension, where what you encounter exceeds what you can process.

The sacred-geometry framework from Senescenence gives this claim a pre-modern precedent: the mandala, the stained-glass window, the heraldic grid are rule-based systems in which the accumulated output carries a quality described as transcendental — not beautiful-but-graspable but incomprehensible-and-therefore-opening.

The practice has produced this effect but has not yet taken it as an explicit program. Future work could be calibrated specifically toward the cognitive breakdown point — systems whose parameters are set to produce outputs at the upper boundary of processability. This is not obscurantism; it is a specific formal target: the threshold where pattern continues but comprehension stops, where the eye keeps moving but the mind cannot follow.

3. Memory architectures at multiple temporal scales

The practice already operates at multiple temporal scales of memory:

the palette is a 22-year memory (Markov's Dream Palette)
the Stained Unravel staining mechanism is a memory measured in CA generations (seconds)
the loom genealogy is a 200-year memory (Senescenence)
the CMYK/RGB divide is a 60-year memory of computing history
the Albers lineage is a century-old memory of embodied algorithm

These operate simultaneously in the work but are not yet composed as a single system with explicit temporal layers. A work structured around multiple strata of memory — each scale producing a distinct formal layer, each layer legible as a distinct temporal register — would synthesize what the practice has developed separately. The palette would be one layer. The CA staining another. The art-historical citation another. The medium's relationship to print another. The layers would interact: what persists at the 22-year scale would constrain what appears at the second-scale.

Memory as multi-scale structure rather than single-register continuity.

4. The squircle as explicit ideology, not just formal terrain

The squircle has been occupied (Markov's Dream, Mutant Garden) but its ideological content — the warmth-as-interpassivity argument, the inversion of Malevich's autonomy-claim — has not been made the subject of a work. See The Squircle for the existing argument.

What would it mean to make a work in which the fitness function explicitly inverts platform-optimisation? Where the criterion is: be as unlike engagement-maximisation as possible — the hipster algorithm applied not to specimen-difference but to platform-value-difference?

This would be the squircle argument made operational: not just formally inhabiting the corporate aesthetic vocabulary but using the logic of maximum-difference-from-the-dominant to drive a generative system. The Nested Exchange hipster algorithm generalised from specimen-level to protocol-level.

The future thesis

The work has been building, across two decades, toward a single philosophical position that it has not yet fully stated in a single work: that the rules which generate complexity are a more durable form of authorship than the forms they produce, that memory is what makes a process an identity rather than just a sequence, and that the moment when knowledge breaks down is not the limit of aesthetics but its threshold.

The future work that would develop this most fully:

A work in which multiple temporal scales of memory operate simultaneously as formal layers — where the 22-year palette is one layer, the CA staining-mechanism another, a learned fitness function (trained on the Dissociations corpus) a third, and each layer's constraints propagate into the others. The output would be a form in which the artist's entire accumulated taste history is structurally present — not as style but as criterion, not as image but as the rule that the rule runs on.

This would be the synthesis the practice has been building toward: not a work that has a style, but a work that is a history — that carries its own genealogy as its generative architecture, that makes the past visible not as quotation but as constraint, and produces at the other end, if the calibration is right, outputs at the threshold where knowledge breaks down and something else opens.