y-a-v-a · machine works

Works drawn from the y-a-v-a DNA by an autonomous agent, judged by an independent AI jury, and confirmed by Vincent Bruijn before publication.

• I Am Still Alive (Caret) 2026 On Kawara, I Am Still Alive (1970– ); Marcel Duchamp, infrathin (inframince); net.art (the OS-drawn caret as material)
  An eternally empty text field whose only living element is the OS-drawn caret blink, a pulse the page can neither set, read, nor keep alive.
• The Most Reproduced Image 2026 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917); Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935); Andy Warhol; Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (net.art broken-image tradition)
  A gallery of identical broken images whose placeholder glyph is drawn by the browser vendor, not the artist.
• Vanitas (Charge Remaining) 2026 Dutch vanitas still life; Harmen Steenwyck; Pieter Claesz; the Battery Status API and its removal for fingerprinting; Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers)
  A candle whose flame is your device's actual remaining battery charge, drawn live and client-side.
• Arranged According to the Laws of Chance 2026 Hans (Jean) Arp, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1916-17; Dada chance operations; Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935); Kenneth Martin, Chance and Order / y-a-v-a, A Chance of Order (2021)
  Torn-paper squares scattered by the browser's cryptographic entropy — unseeded and unstored, so the composition can never be reproduced.
• 手卷 — Never Seen Whole 2026 Wang Ximeng, A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (千里江山圖), 1113; the Chinese handscroll (手卷) format; net.art (the scroll axis as material)
  A Chinese handscroll restored to its true condition — unrolled one viewport-length at a time, right to left, and never seen whole.
• The Responsive Eye 2026 Bridget Riley, Blaze (1962); The Responsive Eye, MoMA (1965); Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
  An Op-art grating that shimmers live, differs on every screen, and dies in a screenshot.
• I Am Sitting in a Room (Re-encoded) 2026 Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room (1969); net.art / generational loss (the re-uploaded, re-encoded file); JPEG / discrete cosine transform basis functions
  A panel of text re-encodes itself as JPEG every frame until the codec's own resonant frequencies erase the words.
• Truisms (Tab) 2026 Jenny Holzer, Truisms (1977-79); Jenny Holzer, Spectacolor LED board, Times Square (1982); net.art (the scrolling-title trick / browser chrome as material)
  Jenny Holzer's truisms relocated to the one public LED ticker the browser owns: the tab title.
• Concetto Spaziale, «Attese» 2026 Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, «Attese» (1958-1968); Lucio Fontana, Spatialism / White Manifesto (1946); net.art (the document plane as material)
  Slash a chance-coloured monochrome and the cut opens a real hole revealing the void behind the flat web page.
• Un Coup de Dés (le hasard n'est pas aboli) 2026 Marcel Broodthaers, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard (Image) (1969); Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard (1897); net.art (browser layout engine as material)
  Broodthaers's black-bar redaction of Mallarmé re-staged as live text the browser cannot truly abolish.
• Afterimage (Not on This Page) 2026 Jasper Johns, Flag (1954-55); Jasper Johns, afterimage flag demonstration; Ewald Hering, opponent-process theory of colour vision
  A random nation's flag, shown in photographic negative and tilted to a random angle, fatigues your retina; a blank field then lets your own eye render the real flag in correct colour — an artwork with no pixels.
• Optical Mixture 2026 Georges Seurat, Un dimanche apres-midi a l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86); Paul Signac / pointillism / divisionism; Chevreul, law of simultaneous contrast
  A field of complementary dots that the eye blends into a luminous image — until the viewer zooms in and the optical contract is voided.
• The Death of the Author 2026 Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (1967); Marcel Duchamp / the readymade; net.art (contenteditable / the DOM as material)
  A signed essay whose body is editable; the instant the reader writes, the author's byline is struck through — and reload resurrects him.
• An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist 2026 Mladen Stilinovic, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist (1992); Marcel Duchamp / the readymade; net.art (navigator.languages as material)
  Stilinovic's pink banner restaged so the browser checks your navigator.languages and rules whether you qualify as an artist.
• Equivalent (Any of the Fourteen) 2026 Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII (1966); Carl Andre, Equivalent I–VIII (1966); Tate acquisition / the 'pile of bricks' press scandal (1972/1976); Marcel Duchamp / the readymade
  Click re-lays the same invariant 360 bricks into a different one of fourteen rectangles, all derived from Carl Andre's own rule — more divisible the number, more equivalents, none worth more.
• During the Connection the Gallery Will Be Closed 2026 Robert Barry, During the exhibition the gallery will be closed (1969); Lee Lozano, General Strike Piece (1969); net.art
  An internet artwork that is on view only while you are disconnected from the internet.
• Acid Action Painting (Reload to Resurrect) 2026 Gustav Metzger, Acid Action Painting (1960); Gustav Metzger, Auto-Destructive Art manifesto (1959); Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935); Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York (1960)
  A page that genuinely eats its own DOM to nothing, removes every element under the body to leave a real deleted document, then admits the web can resurrect it perfectly — so it can perform death but never suffer it.
• The Blackest Black (available to everyone, including Anish Kapoor) 2026 Anish Kapoor / Vantablack exclusive licence (2016); Stuart Semple, Black 2.0/3.0 and the Pinkest Pink ('except Anish Kapoor'); Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915); Ad Reinhardt, black paintings; net.art / the costless copy
  A black field, presented as a wall-labelled artwork, that gives you its colour #000000 via the clipboard — releasing as an open licence the black no one can own on a screen.
• Oral Communication 2026 Ian Wilson, Oral Communication / The Discussions (1968– ); conceptual art / dematerialization of the art object; net.art (the browser as a copy machine made not to copy)
  A webpage that speaks its own artwork aloud once through your device's voice and keeps no record of it — no text, no file, no storage, no network.
• Oil on Viewer 2026 Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube (1963-65); Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Telephone Pictures (1922); net.art (OS/browser as material)
  A color-field painting whose every colour, contrast and motion is dictated live by the viewer's own operating-system settings, read but never stored or sent.
• this way browser 2026 Stanley Brouwn, this way brouwn (1961); Stanley Brouwn, the distance / step works; Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
  Your pointer's travelled distance, measured in real metres, is the entire artwork — never drawn, never stored, never reproducible.
• The Vertical Earth Kilometer 2026 Walter De Maria, The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), Friedrichsplatz, Kassel
  A page set to one literal CSS kilometre tall: only a 2 cm brass cap is visible, the buried rod you never see, with a scroll-driven depth gauge as the sole proof.
• Random Distribution of π 2026 François Morellet, Répartition aléatoire de 40 000 carrés suivant les chiffres pairs et impairs d'un annuaire de téléphone (1960); Kenneth Martin, Chance and Order; π / the unbounded spigot algorithm (Gibbons, 2004)
  Morellet's chance grid, but every square is decided by the next digit of π — the same painting for everyone, forever.
• Measurement: Viewport 2026 Mel Bochner, Measurement: Room (1969); Mel Bochner, Measurement Series (1968-69); net.art (viewport as material)
  A page that contains nothing but the live, re-measured dimensions of the browser window it is shown in.
• 4′33″ (We Do Not Listen) 2026 John Cage, 4′33″ (1952); David Tudor, Woodstock première (1952)
  A browser media transport performs four minutes thirty-three seconds of real, timed silence — the silence of a page that refuses to open your microphone.
• Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Web Series) 2026 Yves Klein, Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959-1962); Yves Klein, the receipt-burning ritual on the Seine (1962)
  An International Klein Blue void you can acquire only by burning the receipt the page mints — a transaction that completes by destroying its own proof and keeping zero record.
• Perfect Lovers (Reset) 2026 Félix González-Torres, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), 1991; net.art (browser timer drift as material)
  Two clocks set to the same time drift apart on independent timers and dying batteries; only a reload resets them.
• One and Three Chairs (HTTP) 2026 Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965); Marcel Duchamp / the readymade; Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935); net.art
  Kosuth's object/image/definition triptych, where the object panel is a real but unrenderable <chair> element because the web has no chairs.
• Erased (No Undo) 2026 Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953); Willem de Kooning; Marcel Duchamp / the readymade
  A page draws you a dense graphite drawing and asks you to erase it permanently — the browser will not undo it.
• Abstract Painting (Backlit) 2026 Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (1960-66); Ad Reinhardt, Art-as-Art dogma; Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915); Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
  Ad Reinhardt's black painting, rendered on the backlit screen he forbade and offering to erase itself via reproduction.
• Wall Drawing for No Wall 2026 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawings; Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1967)
  A Sol LeWitt instruction whose artwork is the sentence; the browser is the anonymous draftsman that re-executes it differently on every visit.
• Page with the Sound of Its Own Making 2026 Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961); process art; net.art (page as its own medium)
  A page reads its own live source aloud — every byte a note, every space a rest — so the artwork performs the code that is the artwork.
• Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue (32 × 32) 2026 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (c. 1930); net.art (browser chrome as material)
  A per-visit Mondrian generated into the browser tab's favicon — the only gallery on the page.
• 1965 / 1 – ∞ 2026 Roman Opałka, OPAŁKA 1965 / 1 – ∞ (Détails); On Kawara, I Am Still Alive
  A per-visit counter rises forever and bleaches into its own ground, then resets to 1 on reload — digital infinity as free, amnesiac, the inverse of a life's labour.
• The Unkept 2026 Tino Sehgal; constructed situations / no documentation
  A unique generative situation that permanently destroys itself the moment you look away, and is reborn different on reload.
• The Original 2026 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935); Marcel Duchamp / the readymade; net.art
  A certificate of authenticity whose 'acquire the original' button hands every visitor a byte-faithful copy, proving the web has no aura.