TOKEN is a network artwork in which a single pulse circulates between all connected nodes. There is no content — only the act of transmission. You connect, the pulse reaches you, you pass it on. If you disconnect, you vanish from the ring without ceremony.

The piece inherits its logic from the IBM Token Ring protocol of the 1980s, but inverts its purpose. Here the token grants nothing. It simply arrives, and leaves.

Beneath the surface: Deleuze & Guattari's rhizome — no center, no hierarchy. And Glissant's Opacity: you do not know who you are connected to. The archipelago is not the sum of its islands, but the sea between them. In TOKEN, the sea is the pulse.

Julien Bayle
Artist & developer working at the intersection of creative technology, generative art, and audiovisual experimentation.

TOKEN is part of an ongoing series of browser-based network instruments.