TRANSMISSION
Three pieces about what resists capture
Three pieces about what resists capture
Transmission is an art installation in three parts. Each piece explores something that resists capture: moments that can't be documented without being destroyed, thoughts that can't be owned once they're shared, and selves that can't be fixed even when directly observed.
This is not interactive art in the conventional sense. These are not games. They are not experiences designed to entertain or optimize you. They are confrontations with the limits of what systems—technological, linguistic, cognitive—can actually hold.
The Moment asks you to be present for twenty seconds while a photograph is taken at an unknown time. You experience yourself. A camera captures evidence. But the moment itself? Already gone. The piece demonstrates that documentation and experience are not the same thing—and that the gap between them is where something essential gets lost.
Whose Thought Is This asks you to share a thought, then immediately questions who owns it. Once an idea leaves your mind and enters another's, can you take it back? If someone changes it, is it still yours? The piece reveals that intellectual property is a legal fiction imposed on something that fundamentally resists ownership: transmitted knowledge.
The Self asks you to describe who you are—then asks again, minutes later. Your answers will shift. The portraits generated from those answers will not match. The piece shows you, through direct experience, that identity is not stable even across tiny durations. You are not the same person who started reading this sentence.
The word has multiple meanings, all relevant:
All three pieces involve transmission: a moment transmitted from experience to evidence, a thought transmitted from one mind to another, a self transmitted from one instant to the next. In each case, something is lost in translation. The transmission is never perfect. The signal degrades. The copy is not identical to the original.
This is not a failure of the system. This is the condition of being human.
These pieces refuse several things that contemporary digital art typically offers:
They refuse gamification. There are no points, no achievements, no leaderboards. You cannot win. You cannot optimize your performance.
They refuse resolution. None of these pieces tell you what to think or feel. They do not offer closure, answers, or comfort. They create friction and then leave you to sit with it.
They refuse extraction. Your data is not harvested. Your responses are not sold. Your image is not stored on our servers. The pieces operate with maximum privacy because the work is about what resists capture—including you.
They refuse permanence. These are not NFTs. They are not blockchain artifacts. They are ephemeral web experiences that exist in the moment of encounter and then dissolve. Just like the phenomena they explore.
This work is not for everyone. It is slow. It is conceptual. It does not resolve cleanly. It asks you to sit with discomfort, ambiguity, and the limits of your own coherence.
If you are looking for entertainment, this is not it.
If you are looking for answers, this will disappoint.
But if you are willing to confront the gap between what you experience and what you can prove, between what you think and what you own, between who you are and who you think you are—then these pieces might offer something worth your time.
Transmission does not tell you what it means to be human in an age of total documentation, algorithmic profiling, and permanent records. It simply shows you three places where those systems break down—and asks you to notice what remains in the gaps.
I have spent most of my career building systems that claim to establish permanence, ownership, and identity.
Blockchain protocols that make transactions immutable. Smart contracts that run autonomously forever. Legal platforms that determine who owns what. Attribution systems that track intellectual property. Onchain reputation frameworks that convert trust into legible scores.
The promise was always the same: clarity through code. If we could just build the right system, we could solve the problems of impermanence, ambiguity, and contested ownership. We could make things that last. We could prove who thought of what first. We could know ourselves and be known.
The more I built these systems, the less I believed the premise.
Transmission emerged from that disillusionment—not with technology itself, but with the assumption that every meaningful aspect of human experience can or should be captured, measured, owned, and preserved.
We live in a culture obsessed with documentation. Every moment becomes content. Every thought becomes a post. Every experience is evaluated for its shareability. We perform our lives for invisible audiences, optimizing for engagement metrics we don't control.
"Pics or it didn't happen" is not a joke—it's an epistemology. Existence requires evidence. Presence without proof is suspect. If you didn't document it, did you really live it?
But something gets lost in the recording. When you're thinking about how this will look later, you're not fully here now. When you're performing for the camera, you're not experiencing—you're staging an experience for future consumption.
The Moment came from this observation. I wanted to create a situation where documentation was inevitable but its timing was uncertain. Where you couldn't prepare, couldn't pose, couldn't optimize. Where the only option was presence—and then, after the fact, you'd be confronted with the gap between what you lived and what the camera captured.
The photograph exists as proof. But the experience itself? Already gone. The image captures one instant out of twenty seconds. The other nineteen seconds and 999 milliseconds dissolved into time. And no photograph, no matter how high-resolution, can retrieve them.
Intellectual property law treats ideas as if they were objects. You "own" a thought. Someone can "steal" it. You can "license" it or "sell" it or "protect" it behind patents and copyrights and NDAs.
But ideas don't work like objects. When I share a thought with you, I don't have less of it. You can't steal what I still possess. And where did "my" thought come from anyway? The language I inherited? The books I read? The conversations I overheard? The culture I was born into?
Now there's another layer: we interact daily with machines trained on billions of human minds. When an AI generates something useful, who made it? The engineers who built the model? The humans whose words trained it? The machine itself? Me, for prompting it? The question has no clean answer because the question assumes a model of authorship that no longer applies.
Whose Thought Is This sits in that ambiguity. It asks you to share a thought—and then immediately questions whether you can take it back, whether it was ever only yours, whether ownership is even the right frame. The piece doesn't resolve the question. It inhabits it.
I've watched the AI space explode with debates about attribution, copyright, consent. Everyone wants clarity: this is mine, that is yours, here is the line. But the line doesn't exist. It never did. We invented intellectual property because it was legally useful, not because it reflected reality. Ideas replicate, mutate, merge. Ownership is a fiction we impose on transmission.
We treat the self as if it were a stable object we can know and describe. We build elaborate models—personality types, personal brands, biographical narratives—to convince ourselves and others that we are consistent, coherent, legible.
But you are not the same person who began reading this paragraph. Not metaphorically. Literally. Your neurochemistry has shifted. Your context has changed. The concerns you brought to this moment are not identical to the concerns you'll bring to the next.
I experience this constantly. I write something one day that feels true. A week later, I read it and don't recognize the person who wrote it. Not because I was lying—because I was different. The self is not a point. It is a process.
The Self emerged from that recognition. I wanted to build something that didn't just describe this multiplicity but forced you to encounter it directly. The piece asks you to describe who you are—then asks again, minutes later. Your answers will shift. The portraits generated will not match. And the work simply holds that discrepancy up and asks: which one is true?
The answer, of course, is both. And neither. You are multiple, contradictory, shifting—and this is not a bug. This is what being human means.
I don't know what these pieces will do for you. I don't know if they'll feel revelatory or frustrating or boring. That's not up to me.
What I can say is this: if you walk away from Transmission feeling slightly destabilized—uncertain about what you experienced, uncomfortable with what you cannot prove, aware of the gap between who you are and who you think you are—then the work did what it was supposed to do.
These pieces are not solutions. They are not arguments. They are invitations to sit with questions that have no clean answers:
The systems we've built demand answers. They demand legibility, ownership, coherence. Transmission suggests that the most honest response might be: "I don't know. And maybe that's okay."
Not everything can be captured. Not everything should be. Some experiences exist only in their living. Some thoughts exist only in their transmission. Some selves exist only in their becoming.
And when we stop trying to fix everything in place—when we accept ephemerality not as loss but as condition—maybe we get closer to what it actually means to be here, to think, to change.
You were present. You had thoughts. You were someone. The systems cannot hold all of that. They never could.
Maybe that's not their failure. Maybe that's your freedom.
— Aaron Vick, 2025
Aaron Vick's Transmission is a trilogy of web-based works that explore the gap between experience and evidence, between presence and proof, between being and being known. Across three distinct pieces—The Moment, Whose Thought Is This, and The Self—the project maps a territory where human experience resists the systems designed to measure, document, and preserve it.
This is not art about technology. This is art made from the material properties of technological infrastructure—surveillance, memory, algorithmic interpretation, networked simultaneity—turned back on the mechanisms that claim to render us legible.
The impulse to capture, own, and fix human experience is not new. It predates digital technology by millennia.
Writing was invented to preserve thought across time and distance. Photography was invented to freeze moments that would otherwise dissolve. Legal systems developed property frameworks to assign ownership to intangible things—stories, melodies, inventions, brands.
Each of these technologies promised the same thing: permanence in the face of impermanence. The ability to hold onto something that would otherwise be lost.
But each technology also introduced new problems. Writing ossifies thought. Photography fragments experience. Property law converts collaboration into competition. The systems designed to preserve meaning often distort it in the process of capture.
The digital era has accelerated this dynamic to an unprecedented degree. Cameras are now ubiquitous and continuous. Every click, every search, every movement generates data. Algorithms profile us based on behavior we don't remember. Corporations build detailed models of who we are without our awareness or consent.
We are told this is progress. Total documentation means total recall. Perfect attribution means perfect justice. Algorithmic profiling means personalized everything.
Transmission suggests otherwise. It argues that some aspects of human experience are structurally incompatible with capture—and that the attempt to force everything into legible, ownable, permanent forms is not just futile but violent.
Each piece in the trilogy addresses a different dimension of this incompatibility.
The Moment confronts the impossibility of documenting presence without destroying it.
You are asked to sit for twenty seconds, watching your own face via webcam. A photograph will be taken, but you won't know when. The only instruction: be here.
This is harder than it sounds. Most people cannot sit still, doing nothing, looking at themselves, for twenty seconds without distraction. The mind wanders. Self-consciousness rises. You become aware of being observed—by yourself, by the camera, by the piece itself.
Somewhere in those twenty seconds, the capture occurs. You don't know which moment was chosen. You experience all twenty seconds as a continuous flow. The photograph isolates one instant and claims it as representative.
When the image is revealed, you are confronted with evidence of your presence. But the presence itself—the texture of those twenty seconds, the thoughts that moved through your mind, the subtle shifts in awareness—is already irretrievable. The photograph is not the experience. It is a fragment, isolated and frozen, claiming to stand in for something that cannot be held.
Whose Thought Is This confronts the impossibility of owning ideas once they have been transmitted.
The piece offers a simple interaction: tell me something you're thinking. You type. You submit. The thought is released.
Then the piece asks: "I know it now. Can you take it back?"
This is not a rhetorical question. It is the central problem of intellectual property in an age of perfect copying and algorithmic recombination. Once an idea leaves your mind and enters another's—or enters a machine trained on billions of minds—who owns it?
The law says you do, under specific conditions: if you wrote it down, if you filed the right paperwork, if you can prove you thought of it first. But these are legal fictions, useful for resolving disputes but disconnected from how ideas actually move.
Ideas replicate. They mutate. They merge. The thought you expressed was itself built from language you inherited, concepts you absorbed, patterns you learned from others. At what point does influence become authorship? At what point does inspiration become theft?
Now add AI into the equation. When a language model generates text based on patterns learned from human writing, who is the author? The humans in the training data? The engineers who built the model? The corporation that owns it? The user who prompted it? The question has no clean answer because the premise—that ideas have singular authors—no longer holds.
Whose Thought Is This doesn't resolve this. It performs the ambiguity. Thoughts submitted by users enter a collective pool alongside AI-generated reflections. Over time, the distinction between human and machine contribution becomes impossible to maintain. A visitor receiving a thought cannot know its source.
The piece suggests that ownership may be the wrong frame entirely. Thoughts are not objects to be possessed but events that occur between minds—biological and artificial alike. Transmission is not theft. It is the condition under which thought becomes possible at all.
The Self confronts the impossibility of fixing identity in place, even across tiny durations.
The piece presents as a psychological assessment. You are asked a series of carefully designed questions about how you experience yourself: your relationship to time, your response to uncertainty, your mode of self-narration.
You answer. The system generates a portrait—a paragraph describing who you were when you answered.
Then the piece asks you to do it again. Immediately. The questions shift slightly—reworded, reordered, recontextualized—but they probe the same territory. If the self were truly stable, your answers would remain consistent.
They do not.
Within minutes, your responses shift. The second portrait will not match the first. The work does not explain this discrepancy. It simply presents it: you were this, now you are this, which one is true?
The answer, of course, is both. And neither. The self is not a point. It is a process. You are not the same person who began this assessment. Not metaphorically. Literally. Context has shifted. Mood has changed. The way a question is framed alters how you answer it.
This is not inconsistency. This is the baseline condition of human consciousness. We are multiple, contradictory, shifting—and the demand that we present as coherent, legible, stable subjects is itself a form of violence.
Transmission could not exist in any medium other than the web. These are not gallery pieces translated into digital format. They are works made from the specific material properties of networked digital infrastructure.
The web enables:
Each piece uses these properties conceptually, not just technically.
Transmission refuses several things that contemporary digital art typically offers:
It refuses gamification. There are no points, no achievements, no leaderboards. You cannot win. You cannot optimize your performance. The works are not designed to entertain or reward you. They are designed to create friction.
It refuses resolution. None of these pieces tell you what to think or feel. They do not offer closure, answers, or comfort. They create discomfort and then leave you to sit with it.
It refuses extraction. Your data is not harvested. Your responses are not sold. Your image is not stored on the artist's servers. The pieces operate with maximum privacy because the work is about what resists capture—including you.
It refuses permanence. These are not NFTs. They are not blockchain artifacts. They are ephemeral web experiences that exist in the moment of encounter and then dissolve—just like the phenomena they explore.
In a culture obsessed with total documentation, algorithmic optimization, and permanent records, Transmission offers a different proposition:
Not everything can be captured. Not everything should be. Some experiences exist only in their living. Some thoughts exist only in their transmission. Some selves exist only in their becoming.
And this is not a tragedy. This is the condition that makes meaning possible.
If every moment were perfectly documented, presence would collapse into performance. If every thought were perfectly owned, conversation would become litigation. If every self were perfectly fixed, growth would become impossible.
The gaps—the things that slip through the systems, that resist capture, that cannot be held—are not failures of technology. They are reminders that human experience exceeds the frameworks we build to contain it.
Transmission does not romanticize this excess. It does not claim that ephemerality is inherently better than permanence, or that ambiguity is inherently better than clarity. It simply insists that both exist, and that pretending otherwise distorts our understanding of what it means to be here, to think, to change.
You were present. You had thoughts. You were someone. The systems cannot hold all of that. They never could.
And maybe that's not their failure.
Maybe that's your freedom.