RO/LU began as Matt Olson and Mike Brady’s landscape office and became an open practice in furniture, sculpture, performance, photography, writing, video, and fashion. Its biography invoked John Cage, Buckminster Fuller’s resistance to specialization, and the sprawling work of the Eames Office. Art history supplied another material to work with. So did the internet.

For A Simple Chair (Returning Home), the studio made a chair on the roof of Minneapolis’s Soap Factory using wood from a city tree. They lowered it down the building and carried it in procession to the park where the tree had grown. Furniture has a fairly direct relationship to trees, but this was taking the long way around.

I worked with RO/LU on several web projects over the years. This was the main studio site, made with Dylan Fracareta. It gives projects, references, and unfinished thoughts room to circulate together. In “Random View,” fragments drawn from a pool are arranged in code among color-treated links to projects. The work appears alongside some of the thinking that surrounds it, with the code making introductions.

Other views put things in more orderly arrangements. Across them, visitors drag and zoom over a large field rather than scroll down a page. Move closer and individual projects come into view; move further out and the surrounding fragments become visible again. Here, a passing thought can be considerably larger than a chair.