A poem by Ana Maria Caballero set on musical graph paper by Harto, in 824 generative variations inscribed on Bitcoin.
Arrangements is a collaboration between Harto and the poet Ana Maria Caballero. A single poem is laid across musical graph paper, and each of the collection’s variations arranges it differently, in its own palette and its own composition.
The project was made for the 200th anniversary of the composer Anton Bruckner’s birth, with the Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz.
Caballero’s poem is an epistolary one, written in a casual, familiar tone, as if speaking to Bruckner like an old friend. It answers a romantic proposal letter the composer once sent to a woman he barely knew.
The visual work turns that exchange into music-like notation. Words sit on staves like notes, so the poem is read and seen at once. Each variation is another way of arranging the same lines, the way one score can be played many times.
Harto and his studio built a generative system that sets the poem onto a ruled, staff-like page. Each variation shifts the colour of the paper and of the large blocks behind the text, from deep reds and greens to pale cream, so that the lines change in mood while the words stay the same.
The text itself is kept readable and fine, almost like pencil on manuscript paper, with the colour acting as the tonal key of each piece.
The collection was inscribed on Bitcoin in December 2024 as 824 variations. Each is a tiny HTML inscription, around 200 bytes, that carries only a seed and loads the generator by recursion. The generator uses p5.js, itself inscribed on chain, so the work is assembled from the chain each time it is viewed.
The poem was also preserved on Bitcoin as plain text inscriptions, separate from the visuals.
2024
Bitcoin Ordinals, recursive HTML + p5.js
824 generative variations
With the poet Ana Maria Caballero, for the Bruckner bicentenary at the Francisco Carolinum Museum, Linz