A student at Bennington was making a film about a breakup. Her first version was careful and controlled: close-ups of objects, slow movements through her apartment, camera on her face. For the second version I gave her a constraint. Nothing above the waist. She argued with it. Then she shot three minutes of feet, hers and her ex-partner’s, moving across a kitchen floor in overlapping patterns of approach and avoidance.
The constraint was the same four words on both days. It arrived as a wall and it ended up generating her shot list.
The tempting reading is that constraints come in two kinds, the ones that say no and the ones that hand you a set of moves. “Nothing above the waist” says no. It’s a prohibition in its wording and in how it lands the first time you hear it. It produced the kitchen floor anyway.
What moved was where she was standing relative to it. A constraint you’re fighting is a wall. The same constraint, absorbed, is a grammar. The rule itself stays exactly where it was.
Fighting a constraint means still trying to make the thing you would have made without it. The constraint reads as damage, a list of the shots you can’t get. Absorbing it means starting from the constraint. The piece gets built out of what the rule permits, and the unavailable shots stop registering as losses.
In 1960 a group of French writers and mathematicians founded Oulipo, the Workshop of Potential Literature. Their working premise was that constraints generate writing.
A lipogram is a text written without a given letter. Georges Perec wrote a 300-page novel in French without the letter e. La Disparition, published in English as A Void. The story is that some of its first reviewers missed the constraint entirely. What registers is that the language is strange, working hard, losing and finding something in the same sentence.
The novel is about a disappearance. Its central character vanishes and the others go looking for him. The missing letter became the vocabulary, then the syntax, then the plot. Perec chose the constraint in advance and lived inside it for 300 pages, which is long enough for a prohibition to turn into a way of writing.
Another Oulipo procedure, N+7, replaces every noun in a text with the noun seven entries later in the dictionary. Run a Shakespeare sonnet through it and you get something strange and funny and occasionally more resonant than the original. Nothing gets added. The procedure generates new material out of material that was already there.
The group’s underlying claim is that every text already operates under constraints. Genre conventions, linguistic habit, a writer’s characteristic moves. Most of them are invisible to the person using them. Formalizing one is a way of arriving on the far side of it deliberately, without waiting out the years of absorption that would otherwise be required.
NTSC encodes color with the YIQ model, which splits the picture into luminance and chrominance and gives them different bandwidths. The eye resolves detail in brightness better than in color, so color gets the smaller allocation. Saturated colors push past what that bandwidth can carry, especially reds and blues. They clip, bloom, and bleed into whatever is next to them.
Broadcast engineers wrote this up as a list of colors to stay away from. Legal limits. NTSC-safe.
Video artists read the same physics as a palette. Warm, slightly washed, reluctant to hold a saturated primary, tending toward ochres and muted greens. A defined color space with an aesthetic of its own.
The bandwidth limit never changed. The engineers stood outside it and saw prohibitions. The artists stood inside it and saw a set of available colors. Two readings of one specification, and the specification is indifferent to both.
I ran 150 turns of dialogue with an LLM character, a boozy ex-politician I call Frank, and watched him flatten out. “Takes a long swig” in 59% of responses. “My good friend” in 30%. Nothing was pushing him off his highest-probability outputs.
Telling the model no does very little at inference time. Instruct it to stop repeating itself and it repeats itself, with slightly more variety for a few turns.
An action vocabulary worked. For each emotional state, four or five specific moves. When drunk: sloshing whiskey onto the carpet without noticing, gripping the armrest to steady himself, squinting as if the room is too bright. The model selects from the list.
A person gets to the far side of a constraint by living with it. The student had a week and a camera. Perec had 300 pages. A language model has no runway of that kind, because it accumulates nothing between turns. So you hand it the far side directly. An action vocabulary is what a prohibition looks like after somebody has already absorbed it, written down as a list of moves.
The tuning details are in the NPC article. The short version is that a signature move at eight to fifteen percent reads as character voice, at zero percent reads as a robot, and at fifty-nine percent reads as a broken record.
Absorption takes time, and time is the hard thing to schedule. You can’t ask a student to be on the other side of a constraint by Thursday. What you can do is hold it in place long enough that fighting it stops being productive.
The constraint was four words on the first day and four words on the last.
By the end she was on a kitchen floor with the camera at ankle height, working out where the feet needed to be.
Related reading
- The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints: the visible constraint and the invisible one
- The Rope from the Inside: what happens once a constraint has been absorbed completely
The NPC work referenced here is written up in Why Your LLM NPCs Sound the Same.
On NTSC signal instability and nervous system regulation, see The Timebase Corrector and the Traumatized Brain.