Nude Studies in Aleatoric Environments, by Pall Thayer, consists of automated nude studies abstracted through geological intervention. Though it was conceived primarily as a gallery installation, here Thayer offers us a “taste” of the full piece. The online version uses 4 locations — Lone Pine, California; College Outpost, Alaska; Isla Barro Colorado, Panama; and Wyandotte Cave, Indiana — and only represents the Americas. The gallery version uses 12 locations and represents the whole globe; it also has audio which could not be included in the online version due to bandwidth constraints.

Another reason Thayer released an online version is because of its “documentation.” The “about this work” link reveals the source-code for the work, which Thayer has open-sourced under a GPL license. He writes “The source-code is presented in a framework I’ve designed called CodeChat.”

Separated into three categories — (1) Visualizer client (what you see), (2) Image retrieval, image manipulation and network communication, and (3) Real-time seismic data retrieval — “it’s a web-based, threaded discussion forum that allows for separate discussion at each line of the code. What I do to start things off is put in a few comments, trying to focus mostly on the conceptual and aesthetic implications of the lines I choose to comment on as I want the discussion to be more at that level rather than a technical level. By doing this what I’m pointing out … is that everything you need to know about the work is in the code … (which) can easily be materialized … (W)hen galleries and museums are wondering how to preserve this type of art, they should be looking at preserving the source-code.“