In 1968 Harold Cohen stopped making paintings and started writing the program that made them. For fifty years AARON drew, and later coloured, on its own. Cohen's rule was total: "I write programs. Programs make drawings." When AARON went somewhere he didn't like, he never fixed the drawing — he changed the program.
But Cohen drew a sharper line still: "the limit on a program's creativity is not determined ultimately by its ability to modify its own code, but by its ability to modify its own criteria." Code is how a system draws; criteria are what it counts as good. Here the criteria live in the fitness function — the engine's standing judgment of which candidate is strongest — and they are not fixed: when a clean single voice, and later a two-voice duet, kept scoring as failure, we changed not a drawing but what the engine values. That those criteria still shift through a human loop, and not yet on the engine's own initiative, is the horizon this work reaches toward.
Mechanical Reverie is built on that stance. No image here is hand-made; the work is the engine, the genome, the fitness function — the rules that stand in for the eye a machine doesn't have. When the engine couldn't dissolve colour like Jeremy Blake or converge lines like Miguel Ángel Vidal, we didn't retouch a picture; we taught it a new way to see.
Cohen called the signature a system grows on its own — the part never in your plan — its entitality. And he held that an artist designs meaning generators, not meaning communicators: the work isn't a message to decode, it's a thing that starts a thought. This archive doesn't illustrate the tweets it reads; it answers them, in a language slowly becoming its own.
Where AARON reasoned about a world — how faces are built, how plants grow — this engine reasons about the history of that reasoning: the moments computation first met art. It is, in a sense, AARON's grandchild, drawing its own ancestors.
If Cohen is how this engine makes, Norbert Wiener is how it steers. In 1950 the founder of cybernetics — from the Greek for steersman — published The Human Use of Human Beings, a book about the one thing shared by the animal and the machine: the feedback loop, in which a system judges its own output and corrects. Mechanical Reverie is such a loop. Its fitness function is feedback given form — the engine's standing judgment of its own candidates, revised when the world, and taste, push against it. Wiener called feedback that reshapes the whole pattern learning; Cohen called the same act changing the criteria. They are one idea, seen from two sides.
Two of Wiener's sentences could be this archive's charter. "We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves — a pattern is a message." Here the work is never the image but the score: the seed-pattern that reproduces it, stored while the pixels are let go. And "the machine's danger is not from the machine itself, but from what man makes of it." Every piece is built of values someone encoded — whose hand, and to what use. The question is not idle: it is the fitness function, out loud.
He even named the archive's oldest tension. Life and machines, Wiener wrote, are pockets of decreasing entropy in a universe tending to disorder; meaning is order held against the noise. The disorder dial is that thought made a knob — and a random-dot stereogram is order the eye alone can find in the static. This engine is a small steersman, keeping a pattern alive against entropy, one day at a time.