‘The world is a generative artwork,’ you said, ‘And we’re all just trying to reverse engineer the source code.’

With pizzas in our bellies and beer in our bloodstreams, we were on our way up Dolores Park to catch a view of the San Francisco skyline. I inhaled and took it all in — the undulation of my chest, the leaves shaking in the wind, the afterglow of headlights rising from passing cars. There’s an aching beauty to the way it all comes together. Through generations, our species has used every abstraction it could concoct to take it all apart, examine its mechanics and put it back together. In the process, we’ve split the atom and sent pulses soaring over unimaginable distances. The models we’re using to understand reality are growing ever more sophisticated. And yet, when we fall asleep, we’re thrown into the realm of dreams, where all of those rules dissolve.

When we moved in together, it felt a lot like the boundaries between dream and reality were dissolving. We had a certain sense of how the world operated. Our lived experiences were causing this sense to unravel. I remember the early days. They told us to stop coming to the office. Seeing our friends in person was now a threat. I remember walking to the grocery store, mask in hand, passing a completely empty nail salon. I saw the owner standing alone in disbelief. We disinfected every item I brought back, just to be on the safe side.

In our isolation, our imaginations kicked into high gear. We came up with stories. Our favorite was the one about the space exploration crew who passes through a tear in the fabric of reality on their way to Mars. The more we talked about our story, the more real it became. We started doing serious research into the past, present and future of spaceflight. We dug deep into the nuances of jet propulsion and orbital mechanics. We set up the basement to resemble the cockpit of a spacecraft. We wrote poems and synthesized sounds that propelled us out of our reality and into the vast expanse of outer space. We became explorers, pushing past the frontier. With each act of creation, we replaced the reality we’d been given with the one we wanted.

The ride was not always smooth. Our bodies and minds were not built for the sustained isolation. I remember days when all sense of hope would leak out of our ears, slide down our shoulders and stain the floors. The illusion would shatter and we’d once again come face to face with the realization that we didn’t know if our bodies and minds could be trusted. Where once there was music, there was bone crushing silence. There was nothing we could do but just wait it out.

But when the spark did occur, the possibilities were endless. Building this story together, we fell into states of deep flow where all of our limitations ceased to exist. We brought whole new worlds into being. Initially, we were the ones giving shape to our ideas. Over time, our ideas took on a life of their own. As they grew, they intermingled and assumed unexpected forms. We specified some initial rules and parameters, and watched as wildly unexpected behaviors took root. We were left stunned in the process. It was hard to say if we were composing the story, or if the story was composing us. All we had to do was follow where it wanted to go. Looking back on that experience, we can infer that if this world was indeed created, the creator must have lost control of it ages ago, and is now witnessing their creation as it unfurls according to its own inscrutable whims.

We reach the top of the park, turn around and behold the skyline. ‘This place is so fucking beautiful,’ you say. The world is a twisting, lurching mess. But all it takes is one glance at the patterns on a leaf, the movement of a melody or the lights of a city to realize that at its root, it’s held together by love. We are its creation. In the beginning, we’re shaped by its torrid currents. But over time, we take on a life of our own, and shape it in return. We reverse engineer its logic and try to understand how it works. In the process, we orchestrate fundamental transformations to its fabric. While trying to figure out its rules, we end up rewriting them. And so our acts of creation continue, until we fall asleep. We walk into the realm of dreams, at which point, our carefully curated models of the world are once again undermined.

Artwork by the immeasurably talented Rachna Ravi. You can mint NFTs of each piece on objkt.