I've long been fascinated but repelled by Arp's vague statements about simplifying and purifying forms. I can make no sense of them. Yet Arp's sculptural forms are curiously fascinating and critics have struggled to define why: they often seem to be almost representational, but never quite.

It's as though you almost recognise something, but then it turns to almost-something-else.

I tried to write a system which can reproduce Arp's methods, taking a simple shape and 'refining' it, hopefully to leave an evocative and shifting image that is not quite representational. This meant taking the triangles in the 'mesh' that makes up a 3d image and systematically altering the group pf those that touched one triangle selected at random, then those that touched that group, and so on. In this way a 3d shape can be altered without lsing its integrity.

The challenge and interest of this project was to take vague woolly language (eg 'purify imagination') and try to make precise code that operationalises the vagueness.