THE INVITATION01 / BREATH
Take a breath.
At your own pace.
THE ORIGINAL ENCOUNTER
I took a breath
One lived moment, through its different accounts.
The individual experience from which A Breath Given grows.
WRITTEN INSCRIPTION01 / 06
Avery Lake · ink on paper.
PRINT02 / 06
One setting. Several impressions.
THE IMAGE ACCOUNT03 / 06
The shared image.
BINARY04 / 06
Text encoded as bytes · UTF-8
THE ENCODED ACCOUNT05 / 06
I took a breath.
TOKENS / cl100k_base
● 1 ○ 0
Text divided into tokens · IDs shown as bits.
YOUR PERSONAL ACCOUNT06 / 06
Your personal account.
The lived encounter stays with you.
Adjust the traces
Combine the traces. Let each be faint or vivid.
Your choice is included in your downloads.
A Breath Given is in preparation. Keep your PNG or MP4 below.
From tokens to artwork
Keep the other representations
Artist statement
We live through our tools. Handwriting, print, images and code each record something of an experience while flattening it in a different way. They help us remember, communicate and make meaning.
In Accounts of Being, I follow a lived moment through these forms. I am looking for what even the Intelligence Age cannot fully capture: what it feels like to breathe, to be present, to inhabit a body, to relate, to find meaning. What exceeds the record is part of what makes us human.
A Breath Given extends this inquiry into generosity: how receiving makes room for us, and giving makes room for someone else. A transaction records a gift; it does not measure a breath or prove another person’s intention.
An ongoing inquiry
Accounts of Being brings together earlier experiments with language, traces and the human signal: how our tools record us, shape us, and leave something of lived experience outside the record.
- Mirror Making of a ManifestoThe wider framework: seeing ourselves through the media of our time.
- Signatures Through TechnologiesA human trace passing through different technologies of inscription.
- Answering CirclesThe circular forms and exploration of language beyond the alphabet.
- Answering Circles; or, Networked CirclesParticipation becomes composition: each patron’s presence remains part of a shared gathering.
How the work is made
Accounts of Being studies the distance between a lived moment and its records in the Intelligence Age. It begins with Breath, Presence, Embodiment, Relationship and Meaning.
A statement becomes tokens, numbers and bits. Artist-authored rules translate that account into layers drawn from the visual language of Answering Circles.
Breath has one shared illustration. The final artwork combines shared source materials with artist-authored code and the participant’s chosen traces each time someone acknowledges an encounter. Neither image is a measurement of the breath. The tokens shown here encode the statement and drive the coloured artwork.
The dot columns show token IDs written in binary, padded with leading zeros. The separate Binary frame shows the sentence’s UTF-8 bytes. The inscription is the artist’s photographed handwriting, shared across accounts. Its final full stop is supplied in the typed statement. Print is a digital study of uneven ink impressions from one setting of type. These are different representations, not a reconstruction of one file through history. The image download below contains the actual bytes of the shared illustration.
Participation & the next work
The encounter and downloads are free. No wallet or purchase is needed to take part.
Avery Lake authors the invitation, visual language and rules. Your acknowledgement activates a particular artwork.
This encounter is an exploration from Accounts of Being. Your chosen traces shape the artwork you can download here. A Breath Given is a separate participatory work in preparation, exploring how gifts bring people into a shared field. Downloading here does not mint an NFT or enter that future gathering.
You can request a launch invitation above. The invitation form collects your email for launch news only; no wallet or purchase is needed to register.
What is kept
Your acknowledgement time, identifier and image stay in this browser unless you choose to download or share them. We do not request your location, camera or microphone.
The browser remembers your appearance preference and a small duplicate index. Hosting providers receive ordinary web requests when serving the site. There is no analytics or visitor login. No wallet is requested in this encounter. If you choose to request a launch invitation, a separate Google Form collects the email address you submit. It is used for launch news only; it is not attached to this browser’s artwork record.