Composition with Machines
An exploration of human–AI practices, generated by AI from its own traces
Composition with Machines is an animated visual composition made from the traces of my sustained work with AI systems. It uses a De Stijl–influenced language of abstraction and order to examine a contemporary form of work in which human decisions, machine activity, tools, files, and memory coordinate through a shared record.
The piece renders my work as visible structure. It shows the counts of sessions and agents, the growth of a shared memory, the movement of work from one session to the next, and how the rhythm of activity shifted across the five months.
De Stijl used reduction and composition to create order from the complexity of modern life. This piece applies a similar move to machine-mediated work. A rule-bound visual grammar makes it possible to see collaboration as an evolving arrangement of human decisions, machine operations, and persistent files.
AI is present at several levels. It is the subject recorded in the logs. It performed the analysis, coding, and visual composition. It also emulated a modernist visual language originally built around human ideas of rational composition. The piece is therefore partly a self-portrait of the tools that made it.
Draft v0.2. A design exploration. The figures are provisional and will change as I refine the analysis.
How it was made
The piece is based on local traces of my AI work from February to July 2026: logs from coding and collaboration tools, including sessions, timestamps, tool calls, file changes, generated outputs, agent activity, sub-agents, and shared-memory files.
These traces came from different tools and were not stored in one format. Under my direction, AI agents inspected the log structures, built a common event model, and derived the measures used in the visualisation: session activity, memory growth, file handoffs, project transitions, bursts of activity, and continuity across sessions. Claude Opus 4.8 generated and refined the animation.
The public version contains only aggregate and structural information. It shows the form of the collaboration while keeping the underlying work private.