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. Each poem here is rendered five times over — five materials, five periods, five whole sets of images and sculptures, for all but two of the twenty. Those five are a shortlist. For some poems dozens of renderings exist, 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. Nor is that narrowing finished, or confined to these twenty: all 154 poems have dozens of candidate renderings apiece, and they are still being worked through. A sonnet gets restyled and its images are replaced; nothing is lost, because the image was never the work. The instruction was.

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 published 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 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. Even the maquette is unfinished: the ledger below counts the plinths in these twenty poems that are still bare, and filling those will likely take another year. 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

20

With sculpture

20

With a draft genealogy

1

Renderings published

97, five per poem for all but two

Sculptures modelled in 3D

663, across every rendering

Plinths still bare

57 of 194 in these twenty

Sculptures in the eventual park

~1,500

Acres acquired

0 of ~60

Which one you meet first

Every poem here is published 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.