The Reach of Here

Individuals in a changing world respond only to local conditions. Only those within a moving field of view can make sound, each emitting a tiny fragment of the whole sound, which shapes its form and connections.

As the field moves, sound and attention shift, and new relations form.

The world begins from a specific “here.” So even within this work, no position can take in everything that is happening: not the individuals, the moving field of view, the viewer, or the author who set the rules.

The work treats Nous / Us as an open question. Coexistence is possible; perhaps “us” is closer to a relation that holds for a while.

It depends on who is within reach of whom now, and changes with those conditions.

An early system study developed in Processing explored a population of autonomous individuals moving through a procedurally generated terrain. Each individual operated through local perception rather than global knowledge, responding to nearby resources, other individuals, and environmental boundaries.

The prototype included energy and metabolic states, ageing, hunger, day–night cycles, rest, environmental stimuli, local avoidance, mating, genetic inheritance and mutation. Individual traits such as size, speed and perceptual range could be passed between generations and altered over time, while an analysis layer tracked changes across the population.

Many of these explicit life-simulation mechanisms were later removed. What remained was the underlying question of locality: how an individual acts from limited conditions, and how larger structures emerge without any position having access to the whole.

From this early stage, the work gradually moved away from ecological simulation toward a relational audiovisual system organized by local conditions, a moving field of view, sound fragments, and changing relations. This Processing prototype marks an important developmental phase in the genealogy of The Reach of Here.

• World / terrain
• Individuals
• Local perception
• Local conditions
• Autonomous behaviour
• Changing relations

The materials below document this earlier prototype stage, including the terrain interface, HUD overlays, population statistics and a short animated capture from the October 2025 Processing system.