Circadian Bloom App

Creating an app means working within systems over which you have very little control. App stores are heavily curated environments, governed by opaque and shifting rules about what can and cannot exist within them. To pass Apple’s review process, an app must be deemed “useful,” “unique,” or sufficiently “app-like,” without those terms ever being clearly defined. The App Store also explicitly warns that there are already “enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune-telling, dating, drinking-game, and Kama Sutra apps,” signalling how narrow and prescriptive the space has become. Apps are also subject to ongoing review: what might have been approved eighteen months ago may no longer be acceptable as expectations around interactivity and technological novelty grow. Within this context, getting something that is fundamentally an artwork approved becomes a challenge in itself. But it was important for me that this work existed as an app, designed to be used on a phone—the primary way most people now encounter digital content. By placing the work in this space, outside the gallery and within everyday routines, the app functions as a small piece portable and accessible of public art. Sound is a central component of the work, developed in close collaboration with composer William Marsey, with whom I have worked for many years. In order to fully understand how the piece operated, William engaged directly with the core Python script that governs the work, so that the way the artwork functions had a large impact on how the score was constructed and made. The score draws on a pop-orchestral recording of the overture to Tannhäuser, which is slowed, warped, and processed—alongside field recordings from the natural world—until it becomes almost unrecognisable. This process of gradual transformation mirrors my own working methods, and it is this shared logic of deconstruction and re-making that has sustained our collaboration over time.