Ringers in Motion:
Strings, Boundaries, and Memory

Having two young children close in age has placed an undeniable constraint on my raw creative output. For a while, there simply wasn’t much time or sleep left over for sustained experimentation. But as sleep gradually returned, so did my energy. Interestingly, that energy did not immediately go into making more work. Instead, I found myself upgrading the tools I use to make it.

That investment became the foundation for Ringers in Motion. The project grew not only from an urge to revisit Ringers, but from a changed relationship with time, process, and creative possibility. I may have had fewer hours available, but I could make those hours more powerful.

One of the persistent challenges of generative art is communicating its scale. As Matt DesLauriers once observed, the idea of infinity is difficult to elucidate, particularly when it conflicts with our desire to capture and preserve finite outputs. A single image can represent one result, but it cannot fully describe the space of possibilities behind it.

This problem has shaped how I think about displaying Ringers. Over the years, institutions and curators have often asked me how I believe the work should be exhibited. My answer has always been consistent: as prints arranged in a carefully curated grid. A single output presents a composition; a grid begins to reveal the system.

I later found language for this intuition in Jason Bailey’s interview with Jared S. Tarbell. Jared described “small multiples,” an idea he had learned from Edward Tufte, as particularly relevant to generative systems. By placing related outputs next to one another, the viewer begins to recognize that they are encountering a system rather than an isolated image. Repetition establishes the rules, while variation reveals their range.

An important expression of this idea was Ringers #962: The LACMA Iterations. The physical print placed Ringers #962, the work entering LACMA’s collection, at the center of a three-by-three grid. Around it were eight related outputs created by changing the percentage of available pegs used by the algorithm. One variable changed while the rest remained constant.

The edition of 726 sold out, with proceeds supporting LACMA. More important to me, however, was how effectively the print helped people understand generative art. A single Ringer can be read as a fixed composition. The parameter sweep reveals it as one possibility within a larger field. It invites the viewer to move from seeing an image to seeing a system.

The format drew from several intertwined histories. Armin Hofmann’s Graphic Design Manual proposed systematic approaches to composition before computers made it possible to explore them at scale. Lygia Pape’s Livro do Tempo influenced how I thought about displaying families of related works and using color across a system. John Maeda’s ParameterVision provided a more direct precedent for exposing the relationship between computational parameters and visual variation.

I learned more about ParameterVision through a conversation involving Tom White, John Maeda, and Matt DesLauriers. Developed around 1999 for Maeda’s Design by Numbers classes, the system took a student’s coded graphic, controlled through two variables mapped to the horizontal and vertical positions of the mouse, and displayed it across a grid. Rather than reviewing one state at a time, the student could see many possible outcomes simultaneously.

The original grids were often much larger than the surviving documentation suggests, and their individual cells could be animated. Tom described the experience as looking through the compound eye of a fly, seeing many related possibilities at once. Casey Reas described ParameterVision as a computational extension of human sight, allowing the images produced by a two-dimensional parametric system to occupy a single image plane.

The lineage reaches further back. Maeda traced his inspiration to Étienne-Jules Marey, whose chronophotography recorded successive stages of movement on a single photographic plate. Where Eadweard Muybridge separated movement into individual frames, Marey allowed multiple moments to coexist within one image. ParameterVision extended this idea from time into computation. Instead of showing multiple moments at once, it showed multiple possible states of a program.

The title Ringers in Motion carries another personal reference. László Moholy-Nagy has long been a hero of mine, and the title consciously echoes his final book, Vision in Motion, published posthumously in 1947. Moholy-Nagy understood vision as active, shaped by movement, technology, education, and the changing conditions of modern life. He treated new tools and materials as opportunities to expand human perception.

I had the opportunity to engage directly with his legacy through Light Years, a series of one hundred algorithmic works and corresponding gelatin silver prints developed in partnership with his estate. Moholy-Nagy’s influence on me is not limited to a particular aesthetic. It is rooted in his belief that art should respond to the technologies of its time, and that tools can alter not only how an artwork is made, but how we learn to see. Ringers in Motion carries that idea into a new problem: how motion can help us perceive the structure of an algorithm.

Tom later applied the ParameterVision approach directly to Ringers. He arranged outputs across a grid according to the system’s principal variables, then constructed a local parameter space around Ringers #879, the Goose. The Goose was no longer an isolated or miraculous result. You could see its neighborhood.

This was not a machine-learning interpolation or an attempt to invent images the original algorithm could not produce. It was a sweep through the internal parameter space of the original code. Some variables moved across their full ranges while others remained fixed. The grid was both an image and a map of the algorithm’s probability structure.

During this exchange, Tyler DeWitt, better known as the artist 0xDEAFBEEF, pointed me toward Andy Lomas’s writing on exploring complex generative systems. Lomas considers the computer not simply as a medium for producing artifacts, but as a tool that helps the artist navigate an increasingly unwieldy space of possibilities. As generative systems become more complex, the instruments we build to explore and understand them become part of the creative practice.

The LACMA print was a deliberately simplified application of these ideas. It moved through only one dimension of the Ringers system, but that constraint made it legible. I also insisted that every print include a visual explanation of the process and an example of pseudocode. It mattered that viewers confront the role of code directly, not as a technical footnote, but as part of the material and conceptual substance of the work. The parameter sweep made the algorithm’s logic visible.

At the same time, the practical reality inside many institutions was moving in a different direction from the curated print grid I had always imagined. Museums had received approval and funding to install large LED screens, and they were now looking for motion-based works to display on them. The infrastructure was already there. The question was no longer simply how Ringers should be exhibited, but whether the project could meaningfully inhabit these new spaces.

When I met Tal Lanir, the proposition felt different. Tal was determined to build a serious new-media department at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. She was interested in the conceptual ideas behind the LACMA print, particularly its ability to expose the structure of a generative system, but her focus was on motion. I felt there was an opportunity to carry those ideas into a format that museums were actively trying to understand.

I did not want to simply animate an existing Ringer or turn the work into a decorative loop for an LED wall. If I was going to make something for motion, it needed to reveal aspects of the system that a still image could not. The screen had to become more than a display surface. It could become an instrument for moving through the parameter space.

If ParameterVision was a teaching tool for making a program’s possibility space visible, I began to imagine Ringers in Motion as its industrial-grade counterpart: a control center for navigating and staging a mature generative system in real time. It needed to do more than display variations. It had to sequence them, transition between them, hold particular states, and remain reliable throughout an extended institutional presentation.

This was where the time I had spent upgrading my tools became creatively consequential. Beneath Ringers in Motion is something closer to a harness for generative art: a system for staging algorithms, parameters, and transitions over time. Although I built the underlying framework to be more general, I spent an enormous amount of time specializing it for Ringers, learning how the algorithm could be decomposed, sequenced, transformed, and made legible through motion. It also required explicit anti-swastika safeguards, a sobering necessity at a moment when hatred seems to be everywhere.

The resulting work contains almost fifty distinct scenes and runs for more than an hour without repetition of those animations. Everything is generated live. It is not a prerecorded video cycling through a fixed collection of images. Each scene highlights a different aspect of Ringers, allowing the system to construct, vary, and recontextualize itself in real time.

In Ringers, a single line wraps around a field of pegs according to a fixed set of rules. Every iteration begins from the same premise yet resolves differently. Over time, watching the line wrap and rewrap gave the work a more personal resonance, one rooted in strings, boundaries, and memory. These associations were not part of my original intent. They felt less imposed than recognized.

The gesture of the line acquires an added resonance for me. It recalls the eruv, which uses connection and boundary to define a shared space, as well as the threads of tzitzit and the straps of tefillin that bind ritual to daily life. For me, these forms suggest ways that line and geometry can become acts of care, using boundaries to create belonging.

This is also a personal search for connection: an attempt to locate myself within systems that define both inclusion and separation. The algorithm becomes a language of contemplation, a repeated act of drawing lines until something human begins to take shape.

The accompanying sound follows a similar logic. Built from the notes of Hatikvah, it is slowed, fragmented, and extended until it becomes closer to the resonance of bells than to a fixed melody. Familiar tones return without fully resolving, allowing recognition to emerge gradually through repetition.

Ringers in Motion became a reflection on how order might hold empathy, how boundaries might create belonging, and how repetition can become a quiet form of devotion.

The LACMA print presents small multiples spatially. Ringers in Motion presents them temporally. The work can move between distant regions of the parameter space and linger around a recognizable output. The screen becomes a changing map of the algorithm’s possibilities.

Now, when curators ask how I want Ringers to be displayed, my answer is no longer limited to a single format. There are physical interpretations that give the work material presence. Individual Ringers can be presented as blockchain-native artworks, with their transactions and provenance forming part of their history. Curated groupings can reveal relationships across the collection. Earlier variations can trace the experiments and changes in form that led to the final release.

With Ringers in Motion, I finally have a software work that can hold many of these ideas at once. It can present individual outputs while placing them within a larger field. It can expose parameters, revisit variations, trace neighborhoods, and move between different scales of the system. Because it is generated live, it retains the computational character of Ringers rather than merely documenting it.

It does not contain every possible Ringer. Nothing could. But it encapsulates something much larger than any individual output. It holds the rules, relationships, histories, and possibilities of the system in motion.

The question of how to display Ringers no longer has one answer. It has become another generative space. Ringers in Motion is not simply an animation of Ringers, but a way for the system to represent itself.

Dmitri Cherniak: Ringers in Motion will be on view at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from August 13 to November 14, 2026.

Location: Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Foyer, Herta and Paul Amir Building

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Tal Lanir for seeing this special project through, come hell or high water, giving generative art hope for a serious platform inside your institution, and for sparking the initial conversation about sound in the work. That discussion opened an entirely new dimension of the work. The resulting audio has transformed Ringers in Motion and added far more to it than I initially imagined.

As I developed the work, Ronen Tanchum became an invaluable sounding board. He pushed me to refine the system, question easy solutions, and be more precise about what the work was trying to reveal. I am deeply grateful for his generosity, honesty, and encouragement throughout its development.

I also want to thank Alan Howard and his family for their extraordinary generosity and for supporting my art both within and beyond this institutional context. Their belief in the work has meant a great deal to me and I do not take it for granted.