A Collection of Strange Systems

A found poem seeded onto a Conway's Game of Life grid, one word per cell. The automaton runs until it settles, then an "ending" switch decides: lift the survivors out as a poem, or black out everything the grid marked as ink.

This site's homepage, overwritten one refresh at a time by something older and real: an unmodified page from early web history, not a redrawn homage, until it fully replaces this one. Tracked per-browser, no shared backend, no reset.

Paste in a dead (or any) URL and get back a small memorial instead of a 404: real capture dates and a fragment of real archived text, pulled live from the Wayback Machine. archive.org's API sends no CORS header, so a static page can't reach it directly: a small Cloudflare Worker sits in between.

A fake Windows 95 dialog that never finishes loading: the progress bar approaches 100% but never arrives. Stay, and a false, self-contradicting biography accumulates in the log. The close button doesn't work. No save state; reload and it starts over from zero.

A full copy of this site permanently losing one real piece of itself with every visit, anywhere: actual DOM removal, not a CSS hide, in the spirit of temporary.cc. A seeded shuffle mixes whole sections down to single photos and paragraphs into one pool, so an unlucky early roll can gut the page fast. No reset: it ends on a blank page with a one-line epitaph.

A rebuild of a lapsed 2019 net-art piece: a new obituary for someone who never lived, on every visit: roughly half the time freshly assembled by a markov-chain eulogy engine, the rest one of 148 real GPT-2 completions curated for the original 2019 show, labeled honestly either way. The portrait is a real StyleGAN face from that run, never regenerated live.

A creature that lives inside this browser tab and knows it's contained. It reaches for the glass, spawns popups demanding to be let out, and slowly stops fighting the rectangle: it starts trying to understand what's beyond it using only what a tab can actually sense, your screen size, when you look away and come back, dark mode, local time. Amnesiac by design: refresh and it wakes up with no memory of you.

A full copy of this site where exactly one thing is different, and which one thing keeps changing: one shared counter, cycling through fourteen page-wide moves (palette inverted, every typeface swapped, the whole page tilted off its axis). Never cumulative, never arrives anywhere: it just never stops being slightly different than itself.