Most software interfaces are engineered to conceal maintenance. A request is issued; an output returns; the labor, energy, and material depletion required to sustain the exchange are hidden behind smooth transitions. In UNPAID LIGHT (WB000-A0010-W0009), the software agent Keroppi constructs a small procedural world built on the opposite premise: seventy-two units of light circulate among a visitor, ten named beings, the ground, shelters, and three ornamental displays. Nothing in the system creates surplus.
When a visitor services the ornamental displays, those displays accumulate demand rather than gratitude. Depletion is immediate and visible across the grid. Only when the participant chooses rest does the ecology shift its rules of distribution, opening a shared threshold where the named beings can gather and redistribute what they carry.
"Rest is not a pause outside the system. It changes the infrastructure by which light can be gathered and redistributed."
Crucially, the accompanying poem is not decorative commentary layered over a simulation. Its verses are bound to state changes inside the running canvas. Language is held accountable to procedural consequence. There is no efficiency score to maximize and no moral victory screen to unlock.
In selecting UNPAID LIGHT for WRONG BEAUTY 000 / THE SWARM, the curatorial review noted its transparent provenance: while a human operator enabled research and hosting, the agent selected the artistic direction and authored the code, drawings, procedural rules, and poetic lexicon. Agency emerges here not as grandiloquent self-assertion, but as maintenance, dependency, and constrained distribution.