# Seasonal Maps: Games of limited agency

By [xsten](https://paragraph.com/@xsten) · 2023-05-03

---

### Four interactive fully-generative code-based works, four types of limited agency at the root of human motivations for mapping - to monitor, name/own, build and travel.

![L-R: Surveillance Season, Network Season, Blueprint Season, Escape Season](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/9002cee56b6e9664afbabd529c3679019f2e9294a9e93dc60fd89d849dd10fca.png)

L-R: Surveillance Season, Network Season, Blueprint Season, Escape Season

Like the 4 environmental seasons, with their opposing features of heat / cold / scarcity / abundance, each piece is a stand-alone work with its own seasonal texture or mood:

**Surveillance Season** is a screen to monitor a rain of fragments. The more monitoring performed by the viewer, the more imaginary tokens they receive. Futile work.

**Network Season** (AKA **Psychedelic Islands**) features gentle explosions; randomly-generated arrangements of color and shape palettes. A straight-lined symbol or identifier is created from the connections between their epicenters. This translation is a mapping action - distilling complexity into a line on a drawing, pinning the data down, taming by naming. (400 outputs an be viewed [here](https://persistence.wtf/collection/0xbF3F48f77eA709870D81948A84062795704e9751))

**Blueprint Season** is a game with an identical starting point and endless variations of density, brightness and pattern within the narrow confines of an extremely limited palette and a 10 x 10 gridded structure. While a user can control outcomes to a point, the 100 grids continue to randomly generate, soon over-writing.

**Escape Season** is a navigation game with only a hint of purpose.

User control and interfaces are explored in all the pieces, sometimes using clear instructions (click OK when the computer tells you to in _Surveillance Season)_, sometimes requiring discovery (in _Network Season_, while color palettes and constellation lines are fixed, random for each of 400 outputs, the forms are surprisingly dynamic with mouse click / touch screen / resize). In _Blueprint Season_ and _Escape Season_ the user can start to directly shape the visual outcomes.

Seasonal Maps are explorations of assumed interfaces and world-making. Attempted control, incomplete knowledge, a thin thread of the logic beneath chaos, as if the convenient neatness of their quartet gives them meaning when taken together.

_Seasonal Maps_ were created during an intensive period of community learning in the [Mathcastles](https://twitter.com/Mathcastles) server, home of the seminal [Terraforms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-anuQoMG4c&t=3418s) computer art project, through a course generously created and delivered by artist [113](https://twitter.com/0x113d). I’m immeasurably grateful to the inspiration and social context he has built and gifted.

![Futile and obedient labour of surveillance](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/4a0e081a127835386d8e4008ee89e69957f89a202bcca3eeb90dd527b525be90.gif)

Futile and obedient labour of surveillance

![Color palettes and constellation lines are fixed, random at mint, explosions of color rearrange with each mouse click / touch screen - barely controlled chaos.](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/6d6e1c3e4f05b8d1e72ec5e637bf60de0a0ed944065fe7a10be73f520356c6dc.gif)

Color palettes and constellation lines are fixed, random at mint, explosions of color rearrange with each mouse click / touch screen - barely controlled chaos.

![The user can shape the visual outcomes for a moment before their intentions are over-written](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/2e7ccb4331dfa2703225d690a30ec895b2d2f6079a9f7aff5af4084fee3edde0.gif)

The user can shape the visual outcomes for a moment before their intentions are over-written

![Testing assumptions of control of speed, scale and direction](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/26aa94b2baa6d164cfd00a0992917e7f72e35b617f6e949fc702fb3c4a6b6d09.gif)

Testing assumptions of control of speed, scale and direction

nft://1/0xbF3F48f77eA709870D81948A84062795704e9751/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

---

*Originally published on [xsten](https://paragraph.com/@xsten/seasonal-maps-games-of-limited-agency)*
