About

You stand on the bank of a small pond with a rod. Pull back toward you and let go to cast, then watch the float and wait for it to dip. When it does, press and hold to strike and reel the fish in. Small fish get swung in by hand and bigger ones go in the landing net, then it’s a look at the card and back into the water.

Everything is drawn in pen lines, like a plotter sketch, and every fish is drawn fresh from its own seed by fishdraw, Lingdong Huang’s generative fish drawer. No two are quite the same.

• A logbook of every fish you’ve landed, its best length, where it took and on what, with the fish you haven’t met yet shown as question marks.
• Bait decides who bites. Bread, worm and fly at the pond, each with its own fish. Some fish only come at dawn, or only by day, or only at night, and the weather tips the odds.
• Your clock is the pond’s clock. Dawn, day, dusk and night follow the time where you are, and the day’s weather is the same for everyone who plays that day.
• Walk the bank to the lilies, the boat, the willow or the reed bed, and pick up what’s lying along the way: feathers, lost tackle, now and then a tip from someone’s notes.
• Two more places open as you catch: an iron pier by the sea with a tide that comes and goes, and a Highland loch you fish from a rowing boat with lures.
• No line breaks. A big fish fights and takes line back, but patience is the only skill it asks for.
• A pond record you can sign with three initials if you want, so the pond remembers who landed the biggest of each.

A catch, screen by screen

A cast at dawn on a phone, and the card for what it brought in: a paper carp, which only comes at dawn. Then a few more fish into the logbook.

Dawn to night

The pond keeps your time: the paper warms at dawn and dusk, and at night the page goes dark and the ink pale. The weather is rolled from the date, so everyone fishing today gets the same.

Three places

Walk the bank to its named spots, or anywhere along it. Catch every common fish in the pond and the pier opens; do the same off the pier and the loch does.