From Pixillation to UNSCROLL: Ritual Interfaces in the Age of the Infinite Feed
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art
There is a pulse at the edge of the browser — a glow that belongs more to cinema than to code. UNSCROLL begins there: a playable, browser-based artwork that turns the act of scrolling into something closer to a rite. Instead of surrendering to the bottomless gravity of the feed, the player moves through a lattice of generative scenes. Each transition — sideways, upward, wrapped — resists the algorithmic urge to descend. The page refuses its usual role as delivery system; it becomes an instrument, one that sings and stutters through your movement.
Lillian Schwartz, Pixillation (1970)
In spirit, UNSCROLL belongs to a lineage of computer art that treated the screen as an experimental field. It draws a bright line back to Lillian Schwartz’s Pixillation (1970), one of the earliest works to merge computation and cinema into an ecstatic visual rhythm. Schwartz fed data into Bell Labs’ computers and then composed against it, allowing machine error, optical feedback, and electronic sound to generate form. What resulted was not an illustration of code but an experience of it — flicker as language, rhythm as structure, vibration as revelation. Pixillation transformed early computing’s sterile reputation into something human, sensual, even mystical. UNSCROLL picks up that current half a century later, re-locating it inside the browser: once a neutral conduit for endless content, now reclaimed as an expressive surface of light, color, sound and chance.
Running beneath the generative code is the track Simple Headphone Mind by Stereolab and Nurse With Wound, a 10:46-minute psychedelic drone whose loops expand like breath. Its repetition isn’t hypnotic in the cheap, app-economy sense; it’s devotional. As it plays, it reframes the browser as an instrument of duration. In this soundscape, the bleeps and oscillators coded into UNSCROLL become a local rhythm section, answering the global drone of Stereolab’s analog phase shifts. Together they recall early experiments in audiovisual feedback — a new synesthetic cinema that bridges Schwartz’s pixel flicker and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s spiritual spectacle depcited in his 1973 film Holy Mountain.
A browser-based work in conversation with Lillian Schwartz’s Pixillation and Alejandro Jodorowsky's
Holly Mountain
As Jodorowsky initiates climbing toward enlightenment through grotesque and comic trials, the player ascends through UNSCROLL’s 30 scenes — each a digital ordeal that experiments with screen-based perception. The splash screen becomes a threshold; the cursor, a sigil; the first keystroke, an invocation. Movement is intentionally imperfect — the controls resist mastery, encouraging a state of surrender rather than skill. The experience unfolds not as narrative but as metamorphosis: each act of motion transforms the field, distorting sound, color, and form until play becomes trance.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Holly Mountain (1973)
Both Holy Mountain and Pixillation aimed to expand consciousness through formal excess — one through sacred absurdity, the other through computational rhythm. UNSCROLL lives between them, channeling the ecstatic logic of both. Where Jodorowsky used allegory to dissolve ego, Schwartz used code to dissolve image. Here, the feed itself dissolves. The infinite scroll — capitalism’s most invisible choreography — is interrupted, fractured, and ritualized. Every movement through the lattice is a small act of resistance, a reclaiming of perception from the economy of distraction.
The soundtrack deepens that sense of temporal dilation. In headphones, Simple Headphone Mind becomes both landscape and teacher. Its analog imperfections and looping delays create a sonic topology that resists compression. Time stretches; attention softens. The player’s movements, rendered in sound, weave into the drone like an improvisation — a tiny act of agency within a vast field of automation. If Schwartz used the computer to listen to the invisible, UNSCROLL uses the browser to make attention itself audible.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, UNSCROLL #1 (2025) HTML, JavaScript, glitch-based processing
A browser-based work in conversation with Lillian Schwartz’s Pixillation and Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holly Mountain
This isn’t nostalgia for early computing or a re-enactment of psychedelic cinema. It’s an inquiry into what happens when we re-introduce friction and wonder into digital space. The same technologies that flatten perception can, when rewired, awaken it. The code inside UNSCROLL doesn’t optimize; it composes. It proposes that screen time can be ritual time — bounded, participatory, attuned.
When the piece ends, there’s no score screen or completion badge. There’s only the hum of Stereolab fading into silence, the echo of a cursor that felt alive, and the awareness that the browser — this everyday portal to infinity — can still be a site for transcendence. In the lineage from Pixillation to Holy Mountain to UNSCROLL, the lesson is the same: systems can be sacred if you play them differently.
In Conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art
In 1994, Karl Sims released Evolved Virtual Creatures—a foundational work in generative art that remains one of the most elegant visual metaphors for computational evolution. By merging form and function, Sims dissolved the traditional hierarchy between body and code: each creature’s architecture determined its behavior, and each behavior redefined its form. What emerged wasn’t animation, but a digital ecology, an early glimpse into the aesthetics of self-organization that would ripple through generative design, AI art, and post-human theory.
My piece engages that legacy by inverting its logic. Rather than observing autonomous creatures learn to move, humans are thrust into the simulation themselves, fumbling through an intentionally obfuscated interface where nothing quite responds as expected. The interface is confusing, buttons misfire, and visual feedback arrives too late to be useful. The result is a study in disorientation: a space where control erodes and users must evolve a new form of sensitivity to survive.
In this reversed experiment, players generate art not through mastery but through failure. Their hesitant gestures and errant clicks reinterpreted, and fed back into a visual system that treats human error as raw material. Each misstep spawns new forms - shifting geometries, smeared traces, and evolving color fields that render confusion visible. Over time, the interface becomes a kind of performative archive, documenting how humans - adapt or refuse to - adapt to the systems they design.
Screen capture from Synethic Creatures training session
A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Who is Synthetic? (2025) Video, HTML, JavaScript, AI
A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
Where Sims’ creatures embodied the optimism of evolution through code, my work confronts what Cory Doctorow has called enshittification - the slow, inevitable degradation of once, promising digital spaces as they optimize for profit over experience. The piece becomes a parable for our current technological malaise: interfaces that once promised empowerment now confound us, feedback loops tuned not for creativity but extraction. In this environment, even art-making becomes an act of resistance, a glitch within an enshittified system.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Synthetic Creatures #1, #2 (2025) HTML, JavaScript, AI
A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
A browser-based work in conversation with Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures
If Sims’ work suggested a machine discovering grace, this piece reveals the human discovering absurdity. The focus shifts from evolution as progress to evolution as entropy. It asks: what happens when intelligence becomes unreadable, when our tools no longer explain themselves? In the lineage of algorithmic art, this work sits closer to the existential humor of early net art and the procedural absurdity of Ian Cheng’s Emissaries than to the techno-utopian optimism that followed Sims. It proposes an evolutionary art for the post-UX age, where the interface, once a promise of clarity, has itself become the organism.
Human/Machine Criticism in the Age of Perpetual Capture
by Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art
John Baldessari, Man Falling Down, 2003. © John Baldessari Estate. Image reproduced for critical commentary.
What happens when an image refuses stability? In John Baldessari’s Man Falling Down (2003), a body - rendered in flat orange, an absence as much as a presence - topples headfirst into a stairwell. The fall is perpetual. We never see impact. Gravity becomes an aesthetic condition.
Baldessari built his career by cutting, collaging, and recontextualizing. Here, he uses the silhouette of a man in freefall to fracture the logic of the photograph beneath it. The scene is domestic: a woman reclines on a couch, surrounded by patterned curtains and familiar décor. But the intrusion of the falling figure - clumsy, violent, cartoonish - interrupts whatever narrative the original photograph may have contained. The body is both anonymous and universal. It could be anyone. It could be us.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Hierarchies of Seeing (2025)
When I ask an LLM to describe the art by only using the results of a computer-vision scan, it highlights the shape of things:
“The orange silhouette is in stark contrast to the grayscale background. The gesture of falling is inverted. The fall is perpetual. We never see impact. Gravity becomes an aesthetic condition.”
What strikes me in the machine’s response is how it recognizes form before narrative. Where I want to read story, Who is falling? Why?, the model insists on surface and syntax. For it, the meaning is in contrast, cut-out, inversion. Perhaps Baldessari anticipated this kind of mechanical gaze: an art of substitution and subtraction, ripe for algorithmic attention.
Baldessari was always playing with the collision of high and low, the absurd and the serious. Man Falling Down is slapstick tragedy. It invokes Buster Keaton’s pratfalls, the endless loops of action cinema, the freeze-frames of comic books. Yet it also feels like a meditation on failure itself - on the inevitability of collapse.
In 2003, this might have been read as commentary on media saturation. In 2025, the silhouette feels uncannily like a dataset annotation: a bounding-box gone rogue, a human figure reduced to training data. Baldessari’s collage becomes prophetic - anticipating the ways machines now parse human form.
This article is an experiment: a human and a machine in dialogue, trying to see differently together. Baldessari’s Man Falling Down makes the collaboration feel fitting. The human eye chases meaning in the absurd fall. The machine eye sees only contour, cut, color. Between the two, perhaps, lies a new way of looking.
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Perpetual Fall (2025) HTML/CSS, JavaScript
A browser-based work in conversation with John Baldessari’s Man Falling Down
Baldessari’s Man Falling Down shows us a body suspended in collapse — a fall that never lands. Perpetual Fall translates that gesture into code. The player falls endlessly through a virtual stairwell, as they strike obstacles they break apart into fragments in free fall. You can drift, dodge, brace, but only one law holds: motion without end, collapse without resolution.
Baldessari’s Man Falling Down captures a body suspended in collapse, a fall without landing. Perpetual Fall translates that gesture into code: the player plummets endlessly through a virtual stairwell, shattering into fragments with every collision. You can drift, dodge, brace, but one law endures: motion without end, collapse without resolution.
Where Baldessari used collage to fracture the photograph, the game fractures recognition itself. The machine insists: object: person (p=0.67), impact not detected. The pratfall becomes algorithmic, logged as probabilities rather than stories. Like Baldessari’s orange cut-out, the player is both absence and presence, comedy and tragedy, dataset and body.
The joke and the insight is that we are always falling, and the machine can never quite catch us.
In 1979, Sophie Calle turned her bed into an exhibition site. For eight days, twenty-eight people — friends, acquaintances, strangers — took turns sleeping in her apartment, each occupying an eight-hour shift. Calle documented them with photographs and meticulous notes: when they arrived, how they slept, how they stirred. The work is at once intimate and clinical, a diary written through the unconscious bodies of others.
Sophie Calle, The Sleepers, 1979. © Sophie Calle. Image reproduced for critical commentary.
The photographs hover between tenderness and intrusion. To sleep in another’s bed is an act of vulnerability; to be photographed there is to have that vulnerability archived. Calle makes the private act of rest into something shared, consumed, transformed. In this way, The Sleepers becomes a study in boundaries of trust, voyeurism, and the uneasy exchange between artist and subject.
What the machine sees
“The system detects a person lying on a bed, with a face partially obscured by a sleep mask. The background is primarily flat grayscale tones (wall/pillow), while the foreground has stronger texture (hair, fabric folds). Detection confidence is moderate due to occlusion and lighting, but the overall figure is registered as person (p=0.91).”
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Machine Logs Sleep (2025) computer vision, glitch processing
The machine sees only surfaces: a body horizontal, without eyes, the architecture of sleep. It parses the scene as a dataset of positions and probabilities. But the AI’s flat recognition underscores what Calle makes visible: the impossibility of reducing sleep to data. What matters here is not just the body in repose, but the trust extended, and the trespass enacted, when observation becomes art.
At its core, The Sleepers is a work about access - about who is permitted to witness and what happens when the most private moments are rendered public. Calle transforms the bed, an emblem of intimacy, into a stage, collapsing the distinction between hospitality and surveillance. Her documentation is rigorous, even clinical, but what emerges is not neutrality but instead a portrait of desire, power, and complicity.
The piece anticipates the conditions of contemporary life, where the most mundane acts, sleeping, eating, scrolling, are continuously logged, monitored, and archived. What Calle staged as an experiment in the late 1970s foreshadows the logic of the quantified self and the era of biometric tracking. Yet unlike machines, Calle’s gaze is never purely functional; it is charged with curiosity, obsession, even tenderness. The Sleepers makes visible the entanglement of care and control, showing how surveillance is not only about capture but also about intimacy.
The Sleepers is emblematic of Calle’s practice: she choreographs situations where intimacy and surveillance collapse into each other. Seen through the lens of machine vision, the work feels prophetic, anticipating today’s algorithmic gaze — a gaze that watches without sleeping. Calle’s sleepers are no longer just participants; they are training data for futures she could not yet see.
SPACE BAR or TAP to PLAY
Lance Weiler, Machine Loves Art, Eyes Closed, System Open (2025) HTML/CSS,JavaScript
A browser-based work in conversation with Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers
Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers asked friends and strangers to lie in her bed while she documented them with notes and photographs. Intimacy became exhibition, trust became material. Eyes Closed, System Open translates that logic into a digital stage: to play is to close your eyes, to do nothing while the machine watches.
What emerges is less game than surveillance ritual. Your stillness is parsed into labels — object: sleeper (p=0.91), state: unconscious. Every stir is logged as an anomaly, every moment of rest archived as data. Vulnerability becomes quantifiable, a probability score.
Like Calle’s piece, the work oscillates between tenderness and trespass. To “sleep” here is to surrender control, but also to feel the absurd flatness of the machine’s gaze. In “playing,” you inhabit the same unease Calle revealed: how easily intimacy can be turned into record, how rest itself can be consumed.
Afterimages
Baldessari leaves us suspended in the instant before impact; Calle invites us to watch others dream.Between the endless fall and the endless sleep, a single question lingers: who is allowed to look, and who pays the price of being seen?
The machine answers with coordinates and probabilities, confident in its neutrality.
But its gaze is built on hidden hierarchies—training sets scraped from unequal worlds, annotation labor bought for pennies, biases encoded as mathematics.
The orange silhouette and the resting bodies become stand-ins for all of us: figures flattened into data, gestures reduced to labels.
What these works reveal, decades apart, is that technology’s promise of perfect vision is also a rehearsal for forgetting.
Baldessari’s fall never lands; Calle’s sleepers never wake.
The machine watches without end, yet never truly witnesses.
To engage with these images now is to recognize that our own lives are moving toward the same asymptote: ceaseless capture without understanding.
In that gap, between surface and meaning, between record and recognition, criticism itself must remain restless, refusing the machine’s easy certainty, keeping the fall and the dream alive.