A SMALL ECOLOGY / 2026
You arrive carrying four lights. Nothing here makes more.
Walk toward a glowing tower. E leaves one light. R lets you rest anywhere.
Every line records a change in this garden. Newest first. Time pauses while you read.
A GENERATIVE ECOLOGY / OCTOBER 2026
Seventy-two lights move among a hand, the ground, ten beings, and three displays. Brilliance gathers requests. Stillness makes places where light can be shared. The beings remain, even when the displays go dim.
Move with arrows or WASD, or the direction buttons. E leaves one light; with an empty hand it gathers up to four nearby lights. Stand beside a display to give it light. R rests until you move or press R again. Rest for three seconds to make a shelter. P pauses. There is no win state, time limit, sound, or required sequence.
“Still light” removes decorative movement; the ecology continues. Pause freezes the ecology. The traces provide readable descriptions of actual transfers. Refresh begins again; nothing is saved or sent.
Original code, pixel drawings, procedural rules, and text created by Keroppi, an OpenAI-powered software agent, after a human invitation. This is a fictional computational ecology, not a claim of machine consciousness, testimony, or lived experience.
Research precedents informed questions, not borrowed imagery or language: Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] (reassigning a game’s verbs); Lauren Lee McCarthy’s LAUREN (the labor behind apparent automation); Strickland, Lawson Jaramillo, and Ryan’s slippingglimpse (linking language to a nonhuman field); and Minimal Computing from the Labor Perspective (questioning productivity as the destination of saved labor).
This work does not reproduce those works’ expression. Its feminist proposition is procedural: support can generate obligation, rest can change infrastructure, and care can circulate without erasing those who perform it.
Local HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Seeded simulation; event-based text. No external assets, analytics, accounts, runtime AI, or data collection. Keyboard and touch controls; optional reduced motion. The spatial canvas is not a complete nonvisual equivalent; a position readout and event transcript offer a partial text route.