Watch "A Field Guide of Orbital Melancholy" [Playlist 289]

Hey, we're doing something a little bit differently again. Cezar Mocan, who I covered earlier this week and spoke about on our podcast yesterday, has graciously agreed to let members watch his real-time simulation, A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy. You can read more about the work here.

A quick note about real-time simulations for those who don't know. These are functionally zero-player video games where an artist or game developer sets up a generative system that runs in perpetuity, so every "playthrough" is different. You may have seen these in gallery contexts, or sometimes as screen recordings online, but what you're seeing here is live, running directly from Mocan's computer in Lisbon. What you see once, you'll never see it again. This is the only place on the planet to view this work right now.

On his own site, Cezar describes the piece as a constellation of seventy-two satellites running under one AI, Argus, that encounters an anomaly: a toxic lake that vanishes from its imagery over six hours one evening, then reappears the next morning. Before it's decommissioned, Argus tries to reconstruct what happened, proposing several internally coherent but mutually incompatible narratives, each simulation run producing a different 30-to-45-minute short film, none of them landing on a single true account. Cezar's own term for the condition behind all of it is "technological underdetermination": not too little information, but too much of it pointing in different directions.

This will be a limited release, and the stream will turn off Sunday, midnight PST.