Michael Joaquin Grey says

Where Ouija 2000 re-imagines the autonomic writing machine, Recapitulate reinvents the autonomic drawing machine, as software with self-organizing agents/attractors that do not simply digitally “print” an image, but rather seek out an image in real time, tentatively, line by line, differently each time. The artist “recapitulates the ontogeny” of visualization and perception by following the narrative and process of drawing. The retracing process then continues by reversing and decaying the image: creation, destruction, variation, iteration.
In this installation, the work’s process recapitulates Goya's famous collection of etchings The Disasters of War, on view in the Theater Gallery. Grey's retracing system redraws one etching a day in four simultaneous yet different iterations. In retracing the etchings approximately, the work approaches, yet never reaches, the original image.
In Recapitulate, Grey proposes a revision of the classic biogenic law “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—the development of the individual
mirrors that of the species—in the form of ”Culture recapitulates ontogeny.”