Work in Progress
Max/MSP, video, monitor

Work in Progress is conceived as a Procedural Book – a book that exists not as a fixed object but as an algorithmic process unfolding in time. The work begins with a series of performative gestures: arranging printed material on a desk to simulate recto and verso pages. These actions are recorded in video fragments, which become the raw material for a generative system. Using Max/MSP, the videos are superimposed through two mathematical operators, multiplication and difference, recalling the logic of ink overlay in printmaking. Here, however, the inks are pixels, and the press is software.

The algorithm selects videos at random, starts from arbitrary points and layers them unpredictably, producing hybrid compositions that are unlikely to repeat. In this endless recombination, the book becomes a temporal topology, an infinite library that never stabilises, echoing Borges’ Library of Babel and Calvino’s combinatorial narratives. Like those imagined structures, Work in Progress suggests a text that cannot be fully read because it is always in flux, always generating new configurations.

By merging manual gesture with algorithmic chance, the work interrogates the boundaries between print and digital, authorship and automation, materiality and code. It asks: what does it mean for a book to be procedural, to exist as an event rather than an object? In this space, the codex is reimagined as a dynamic system – a book that writes itself endlessly.

Exhibitions:

Joe Gilmore, 'Bookwork', Henry Moore Institute Research Library, Leeds, UK

'Code.Xcess' (group exhibition curated by Nick Thurston and Ingrid Chu), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, China

'Infrastructure, Space', Architecture Symposium, Manchester School of Art, Manchester, UK