Photomontage (whereabouts unknown)

'The Key' is a visual map tracing the future return of abstract painting to landscape. An initial pattern determined using Piet Mondrian’s late, sometimes unfinished paintings was subjected to the “Game of Life,” a process invented by British mathematician John Conway, in which individual squares “live” (remain) or “die” (disappear) according to the status of their immediate neighbors; for instance, any square with more than three neighbors “dies” of overcrowding. Identical images bracket the timeline’s 10 segments, or roughly a century: Mondrian’s 'Blue Chrysanthemum,' a delicate, slightly wilted stem in watercolor and ink.