In order to move forward, we had to put out multiple fires at once, but occasionally our prototype actually caught on fire to remind us of that. Seeing how calm and elegant the piece looks now almost makes me forget about the complexity and the struggle of its genesis. And that amply captures the primary technical goal, which was to serve the visual metaphor. We wanted to breathe life into this piece and generate randomness, yet the software components were inherently about normalization. This tension between the natural and the artificial was the challenge for us. We attempted to engineer something that feels alive with inorganic parts.