seeing http://worrydream.com/July2023/ i’m struck by the idea that dynamicland as it exists is a project that is defined by its main steward and locale but not by a greater audience that might be capable of deploying it or even interacting with it. his reluctance to general adoption reminds me of the way that people carp about Major Players embrace/extend/extinguish strategy with open protocols at the same time that they try to advocate for retaining control of the protocol.

bret operates like an Artist but it’s hard to square the way he wraps it in the trappings of Academic Research, that is, he’s making his own thing, has a body of work, has a clear Direction and Process but is wholly uninterested in other people generally doing his thing. arguably most researchers are not super invested in ‘a working dialog’ with some random crank with a github account, but it’s, i think, telling, that nobody has been invested enough to try to reproduce the DL Magic™ and he seems uninterested in it becoming an actual general purpose environment, more than he’s interested in it being his own kind of Warhol Factory (or parc, yes, yes, i know).

in the sense that DL has felt unsatisfying, it’s probably largely to do with the tension between it being very obviously a working Studio centered around bret’s practice but attempting to operate like a research group.