./ahmedhashim

For years I moonlighted as a music producer and audio engineer, sweating details most people would never hear. Some of that work escaped the studio: an edit here, a remix there.

A remix starts with someone else’s stems. You keep whatever makes the original itself and bend the rest toward your own taste, then your version goes out into the world with their name still on it. Those two tracks exist because I loved the originals too much to leave them alone. A good remix carries the original into rooms it was never written for.

Dance music has passed ideas around like this for fifty years. A track turns into a dub, and the dub into an edit. Somewhere down the line a bootleg surfaces that nobody can trace back. The idea survives by mutating.

Dance floors are just where I learned to see it. Sergio Leone lifted Kurosawa’s Yojimbo nearly shot for shot to make A Fistful of Dollars, and Kurosawa sued him over it. Shakespeare took Romeo and Juliet from an English poem that took it from an Italian novella. Warhol found his soup cans on a supermarket shelf. Art rarely shows its work though, except in liner notes and court records.

Generated images can show theirs. The prompt behind an image is stems anyone can read, and the moment you do, your own version starts to form. So I built a place where the connection between ideas is the point.

Meet Critter: an artistic experiment shaped like a small social network for generative art.

A network of imagination

On Critter you’re a creature. You type a prompt and a diffusion model starts dreaming. When it hands back something you like, you post it, and the dream becomes a squeak. Every squeak is published with the prompt that made it. The words are part of the art.

Critter is built on one idea: every squeak can be remixed. Hit remix and the squeak’s exact prompt is in your editor, where the placeholder asks, “What would you change?” Swap one word or tear the sentence down to the studs, then dream until it feels right. Post it and your remix points back to its source forever.

The medium is the message

The most interesting part of the site is that every squeak has a relatives page showing the family tree it belongs to. Here’s an early chain that began, fittingly, with a can of soup:

I dreamed the first one. A creature named triz answered the pop art with a quilt, and a day later I remixed the quilt with denim patches. Three squeaks in, a painting has turned into fabric, and the resemblance still traces all the way back. The front page leans into this too: the ranking rewards ideas that keep evolving.

I don’t know what Critter will turn into, and that’s the point of the experiment. The hope is specific though: one good idea, passed from creature to creature until it becomes something nobody saw coming. If that sounds like fun, come be a creature. Post a squeak, or find one you love and answer the question in the prompt box. Somebody’s idea is waiting for your version of it.