The thread of consistency, aesthetic logic, must remain unbroken. At the core of the living artist's evolving work there must be a redundancy of form and a consistency in the method by which disorder is processed into form. This redundancy of form and method creates a recognizable identity. This identity is the address of the work - the site of information. An evolving body of work has no fixed address except its recognizable appearance.
Identity is address in the territory of appearance.
This address, while necessary for recognition, unfortunately prescribes the parameters of new works. All mature artists with considerable bodies of work eventually fall victim to the weight of their own history. They must continuously update what they do while remaining consistent with their past work. In fact a common strategy in the 20th century has been to remain completely consistent - to repeat the same information as art over and over and over. In a 21st century culture, value will be determined increasingly by the freshness or newness of information, and this vitality of information will be based on the timely, continuous introduction of apparent new qualities.