Stage 02 sees another 14 artists (including some overlap with the Stage 01 group) choosing from amongst the field recordings in Stage 01 and using them as source material for a series of audio compositions of three minutes or less duration.

While the compositions are unique, there are several common threads amongst the works. In seeking to produce sounds that abstractly convey the impression of networks and communication across vast spaces, most of the artists chose to soak their recordings in copious amounts of reverb, signals echoing across a vast open space. More than half of the artists chose Bryce Beverlin's "Fire at Cabin", and nearly half of the artists chose Heribert Friedl's "Try" as a source (no doubt influenced by those pieces' melancholic notions of peaceful escapism – somewhat of a depleted resource at the moment).

However, only one artist was bold enough to select every field recording and incorporate it into a single three-minute composition (DeVico's thick-as-pea-soup "Slim Jewel"). And only 3 of the 14 chose to focus on only one source recording over the "sonic cubism" approach of the multiple-source composers.

My own contribution to Stage 02 is its visual component, the Network Codex. Using a combination of cubist, pointillist and minimalist visual techniques along with references to video games, flowcharts and flags, this "scroll" (both figuratively and literally) combines every photograph from Stage 01 into a seamless, flowing composition. Read left to right or right to left, the viewer is allowed the option to move through the piece at will while being limited in the amount of visual information available on the screen at any given time; new compositions are created with each pause of the mouse. Rather than an "ancient manuscript", this "codex" contains no text yet still tells a story – but it is up to the viewer to determine what that story may be.

Stage 03's live interpretation of these sources promises to narrow the projects focus, condensing the audio and visual material to a single cross-disiplinary event.