THE INSEPARABLES

A real-time work for the browser, in continuous development since 2026.

Two birds painted by a child, Melinda, at eight, grown into two living forms that share one origin and drift apart through time and through the people who come close. The dark one is hers; she answers it from time to time. The pink one belongs to everyone who visits. Behind them, figures in pencil come and go: what the birds remember. Before the birds, there is an egg. The work has no levels, no story to finish and no end; it is the same work today and in ten years, only older.

Online

theinseparables.art, in a current browser with WebGPU (Chrome and Chromium-based browsers today). Browsers without WebGPU receive a simpler, two-dimensional version of the same work, with the same memory. Nothing to install.

In a room

A large screen or a projection in low light, fullscreen, from a computer with a current graphics card running a browser. The work is a single page; it does not need an internet connection once loaded, except to read the time from its own server.

Tested

Chrome on Apple Silicon, including automated runs of thirty minutes and recovery from loss of the graphics device. Other browsers and other machines are being tested; the specification for a given room is agreed before the show.

A visit can be entirely contemplative. The birds notice presence: coming closer, staying, leaving. Touching the pink bird opens a card with a few questions, nothing to type, once a day; what a visitor leaves changes that visitor's pink bird a little, without explanation. In a room, a presence sensor or a touch surface can take the place of the cursor. There are no menus, scores or accounts, and nothing to unlock.

Versions

Every published version is built from a tagged source commit and carries its own fingerprint: a SHA-256 of each file in a release manifest.

Time-stamp

The manifest and the checksums are time-stamped on the Bitcoin blockchain through OpenTimestamps, so the existence of each version at a date can be verified by anyone, without us.

Archive

The source, the published build, the history of changes and the operating notes are kept in an offline evidence package, with copies held apart. A previous version can be put back on line from the archive alone.

Limits

Authenticity of the files is guaranteed; behaviour on future hardware and browsers is not. The work depends on WebGPU; the two-dimensional version is the fallback and is preserved with it.

No account, no form, no cookies for tracking and no analytics. The work does not know who is visiting. The answers a visitor gives on the card are stored only in that visitor's own browser, next to their copy of the pink bird; they are never transmitted, and the visitor can erase them by clearing the browser. Melinda's answers are written into the work itself by the author, as a new version. Nothing about a visitor is kept anywhere else, for any length of time.

Curators, museums, festivals, residencies and collectors: curator@theinseparables.art. One message is enough.