When a silkworm spins a cocoon it is a form of drawing; labour, memory, movement, time. The shared signal structure is what threads the silkworms to the robotic system. The biosignal is registered through EEG sensors (is the trace). The movements of the drawing system are my own labour and brainwaves, threshold-dependent. Labour transmuted, transduced, into electric signal. Pulse waves driving the kinematics of the robotic arm.

The robotic units trace brainwave data. the silkworms spin their cocoons. The robotic units draw the habitat and the circuitboard traces are what they "spin." Human presence remains. Human presence as electrical current.

Creating an EEG sensor with silk fibroin film. Need to elucidate how robotic units connect to the silkworms... fundamental questions. The robotic units are connected to the biosignal. The biosignal drives the care sequence. The care sequence produces the conditions for metamorphosis. The silk proteins are extracted and integrated into circuits. The circuits carry the current that began in the body. The loop closes at the material level.

Mind / body generates current. Current is measured. Translated into mechanism (robots). Mechanism enacts sequence (care). Care sequence produces silkworm metamorphosis. Silkworm metamorphosis produces cocoons. Cocoons' silk proteins are extracted. Silk proteins are integrated into circuits. Mind / body generates current. Current flows through silk circuits. Circuits embedded in mechanism (robots).

A performance needs liveness. A performance is a physical test of stamina -- alpha waves heightened in the attentional environment. Attention cannot be simulated; gaze as the stress test. Stress testing the system, moments of error. Autonomy and automation. Simulation and simulacra.

Operational art as a practice ongology that argues that artistic meaning is constituted by the full system of its production. Material, protocol, ethics, signal, labour matter. Not by what it makes but by how it forms new ways of making. What was once understood as process or practice now exists through a new combinatorial scaffolding: thresholds, politics, perspectives, ethics, protocols, strategies, materials, traces, artefacts, sequences, procedures.

The metastasis of art or the conditions under which art is produced is programmable. A mode of interrogation, invention, interception. Metastable, meta-unstable. It forms its own system (or ecology), which becomes the art.

This breaks from process art, which indexes time and sequence without claiming the system itself as the work. This breaks from "art and technology," which presupposes a separation that operational art refuses. It breaks from the spectacle of "AI art" and the reductive role assigned to art utilising emerging technology: defining meaning for a "general audience," performing its own sociotechnical framing.

Operational art rejects the reductive categorisation of genre and the consistency of style as an endpoint. It posits the entirety of art history — painting included — as artefacts of arching operational schemas. We see operational art coming to be through the acknowledgement of the transferability of style via style transfer, of visual aesthetics being clonable.

Operational art names existing movements — protocol art, bio art, technology art, AI art — and positions them within a broader horizon of meaning. It moves beyond art as cultural production and turns inward, into the forces, materials, intentions, environments, and circumstances that produce artistic objects.

Operational Art is the aesthetic practice — our irreversible co-constitution with computational systems — legible through gesture. It performs a local instance of it and makes that instance available for witness

operations that are ontologically generative
barad's intra-actions -- entities don't pre-exist their encounters. the apparatus and the phenomenon are the same event.

The problem with "medium" — it implies the artist is on one side and the work on the other, with some substance in between. Oil. Clay. Code. But what if the medium is the relation itself? What if Operational Art names a practice where the medium is the act of mutual constitution?
desprets work on ethology

What I want to say, and haven't yet found the sentence for: the drawing doesn't represent entanglement. The drawing is an instance of entanglement that has been slowed down enough to witness.

what things are are constituted by what they do

Operational art is an imperfect term. In its attempt to speak plainly it veers toward the mechanistic. Artists as authors of operational paradigms, schemas, systems. It has historical ties to military strategy — the register between strategy (why) and tactics (how). The design of campaigns. The sequencing of engagements toward a strategic aim. (Maybe I like it because it feels in line with the art of war.)

To name a practice ontology is to refuse the question "what is it?" in favor of "what does it do?" — and more precisely — "what does it make possible?"

Maybe the work isn't linear. It is a material poetic.

Note to self: stop saying "collaboration." It flatters both parties. What happens in the drawing is harder than that. Closer to what Despret describes with her animals — the researcher doesn't observe the bird, the researcher becomes someone the bird can respond to. The practice produces new capacities. In both.