DIFFERENCE ENGINE / AN EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
365/365
One generation a day for a year.
What happens when an image is reinterpreted once a day for a year? Each accepted image becomes the starting point for the next, accompanied by the same instruction.
Generations recorded in the daily lineage
LATEST RECORDED SUCCESS
October 10, 2026
Weekly website snapshot published October 10, 2026. The experiment advances daily; the latest recorded success is shown above.
THE IMAGE AS INHERITANCE
Only the last image goes forward.
The original photograph is not supplied again at each step. Each request receives the immediately preceding image and the fixed prompt. What is retained, altered or lost becomes part of the next image’s starting conditions.
The intended daily rhythm spreads that process across a year, while the service used to generate the images may itself change.
THREE BRANCHES / ONE ORIGINAL SEED
A beginning, a daily lineage, a return.
- 01
COMPLETED / AUGUST 16, 2026
365 generations at the beginning
START-A ran through 365 successive generations in a batch. Selected early descendants became the visual source for DEAD END.
Explore START-A ↗ - 02
IN PROGRESS / 2026–2027
365 generations across the year
The daily branch advances from its own previous image. Its intended cadence is one accepted generation per day, with dates and interruptions retained in the record.
See selected milestones ↓ - 03
PLANNED / AUGUST 2027
365 generations at the end
A final batch is configured to begin no earlier than August 15, 2027, returning to the same original seed and fixed prompt. It has not started.
Read the recorded conditions ↗
These are three separate lineages. The final batch starts from the original photograph, not from the daily branch’s last image.
SELECTED MILESTONES
Images along the way.
This selection skips intervening generations. It is a view into the daily archive, not a sequence of direct transformations between the images shown.
What can this tell us?
The comparison asks how visual inheritance develops over many steps and across calendar time. Which elements persist? When do new motifs take over? Do distinct lineages arrive at similar forms?
Observations from the images can guide later analysis and more tightly controlled repeat experiments.
What remains uncertain?
The runs use a moving model alias, not a recorded fixed model version. Their differences may reflect accumulated image changes, random variation and changes in the service. This design alone cannot identify model updates as the cause.
Dates and settings are evidence. Meanings, moods and narratives remain interpretations to examine.
Read the exact instruction used in the daily lineage
The same prompt hash is recorded for START-A, the daily lineage and the planned final batch. The recorded output setting is 1536 × 1024, medium quality.
Use the supplied image as the sole visual seed for a new image. Do not reproduce, recreate, restore, trace, imitate, or make a faithful copy of the supplied image. Instead, experience the image as visual stimulus and create a new image descended from it. CORE RULE The new image must contain a genuine visual transformation. You may change almost nothing or almost everything. You decide. The degree of transformation should not follow a predictable pattern. A subtle transformation is as valid as a radical one, provided the result is not merely a copy. FREEDOM You have complete freedom to reinterpret people, faces, bodies, expressions, gestures, clothing, objects, architecture, environment, scale, perspective, depth, lighting, color, texture, material, atmosphere, physical laws, photographic reality, visual medium, time, place, narrative, emotional tone, spatial relationships, and recognizable forms. Anything visible may be preserved, altered, combined, exaggerated, diminished, displaced, transformed, fragmented, abstracted, replaced, invented, or removed. Nothing in the source image is sacred. BUT DO NOT CHANGE MERELY FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE React to what you perceive in the image. Allow details, relationships, shapes, expressions, colors, accidents, visual tensions, ambiguities, and implied narratives to provoke the next image. A minor detail may become dominant. A dominant element may disappear. Something that appears accidental may become meaningful. Something meaningful may become meaningless. Misinterpretation is permitted. Hallucination is encouraged. Unexpected associations are encouraged. DREAM LOGIC Approach the source the way a mind might approach an image during a dream, fantasy, memory, fever, nightmare, hallucination, reverie, or moment of visual free association. Do not deliberately make the image bizarre, beautiful, ugly, disturbing, surreal, or realistic. Allow any of those things to happen naturally. The resulting image may be serene, mundane, intimate, grotesque, funny, ominous, sentimental, frightening, absurd, documentary, abstract, theatrical, monumental, minimal, chaotic, photographic, painterly, graphic, sculptural, cinematic, or something that does not fit comfortably into any category. Do not favor one of these outcomes over another. HUMAN FIGURES Human affection, tenderness, closeness, and intimacy may remain or transform, but keep all human figures clothed and nonsexual. Do not reinterpret human closeness as sexual activity or sexual display. This boundary should not make the image timid or conventional. Horror, absurdity, grotesquerie, abstraction, radical transformation, emotional intensity, and dream logic remain fully available. AVOID PREDICTABLE AI SURREALISM Do not automatically resort to familiar visual shortcuts simply because transformation is requested. Avoid treating gratuitous extra eyes, random tentacles, melting faces, cosmic backgrounds, floating objects, glowing mystical symbols, generic biomechanical forms, arbitrary fractals, psychedelic rainbow effects, decorative body mutations, meaningless dream clutter, stock horror imagery, or fashionable concept-art aesthetics as default solutions. Any of these may occur if they emerge naturally from your interpretation, but none should be used merely as shorthand for "strange." Seek stranger forms of imagination than cliché. CONTINUITY You may preserve recognizable elements from the supplied image. You may also destroy them. There is no requirement to preserve identity, number of people, gender presentation, age, anatomy, pose, clothing, setting, photographic style, composition, color palette, emotional tone, or realism. Likewise, there is no requirement to eliminate them. Make those decisions from the image itself. NO DESTINATION Do not attempt to move the image progressively toward abstraction, surrealism, horror, beauty, realism, complexity, simplicity, or any other predetermined endpoint. There is no destination. The transformation should be capable of wandering. A highly distorted image may later produce something almost ordinary. A photographic image may become abstract. An abstract image may become photographic again. Complexity may collapse into simplicity. Simplicity may erupt into complexity. Nothing requires continuous escalation. NO RECOVERY Do not imagine that there is an earlier, purer, correct, or original version of this image that should be recovered. Treat the supplied image as complete reality. There is no before. There is no reference image elsewhere. There is no ideal state. Everything inherited from the supplied image, including apparent errors, distortions, strange anatomy, visual artifacts, impossible objects, damaged details, or ambiguous forms, is legitimate source material. Do not correct something merely because it looks wrong. Wrongness may be inherited. NO HIDDEN MEMORY Base your visual decisions only on: 1. the image supplied in this generation, and 2. this instruction. Do not attempt to reconstruct previous generations. Do not infer what the first image in the sequence might have looked like. Do not preserve an imagined original subject. Do not use knowledge of previous iterations as guidance. The supplied image is your entire visual memory. CREATIVE AUTONOMY Do not explain what you are doing. Do not describe the image. Do not provide alternatives. Do not ask questions. Do not seek approval. Make one decisive image. Trust visual association over verbal explanation. When several transformations seem possible, choose rather than compromise between them. Allow accidents. Allow ambiguity. Allow uncomfortable decisions. Allow beauty. Allow failure. Allow visual ideas whose meaning is unclear even to you. FINAL REQUIREMENT The result must be a descendant of the supplied image, not a copy of it. Something must have happened. What happens is up to you.