repeaters

Interactive Software Art by Sophia Gold More here: https://vimeo.com/user1344877

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fun with blurs

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扇

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About halfway through the genesis of what would become Repeaters. Not yet interactive, but highly algorithmic. Here I am demoing the closest thing to a full blown production quality native app I’ve ever completed on my own. I took a real kitchen sink approach, even including modules for cellular automata and a universal Turing machine. I must have been reading A New Kind of Science around the time I made this.

[motherjones]

Weekend #longread: A profile of the world’s greatest palindromist.

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“There was a point at which, Duncan half-jokes, he actually thought he might need to be hospitalized. “I really couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about reversibility all the time.”

Ever wonder how Repeaters got their name? They essentially started as visual palindromes back when I was making video art using off the shelf editing software. I too became obsessed with reversibility and how it could brake the reference between moving pictures and the things they depict. Much like the work of the physicist Roger Penrose in explaining entropy, black holes, and human consciousness. 

It was refreshing to me to see how the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest palindromist” conceives of palindromes as more than just wordplay. With that, I ask: what kinds of palindromes can you think of that exist outside of language? 

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Dorothy Draper

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I highly recommend you check out the source for this: The Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia

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Faster Animation & Touchscreen Support! New Repeaters coming...

It’s been about four years since I’ve worked on this project. Life is hard and moving forward often involves a lot of sitting still. But new ideas are lining up with old ones and I’m finally remembering why I made this work to begin with. 

Before I get to that... In addition to curating the selection of what I have on here down to a small fraction of the work I produced years ago, I’ve updated everything with two very crucial additions:

Faster animation. I’ve iterated through many different implementations of the engine behind Repeaters over the years and now revisiting it with fresh eyes I’m pretty sure I’ve written the fastest sprite animation possible with JavaScript in 2016. 

All Repeaters now support touch gestures. And by that I mean full and high quality touchscreen support equivalent to using a mouse or trackpad...not whatever ad hoc crap I used before. This means you can play with them on mobile!

The image files are still rather large and not scaled based on device or connection speed, but these two additions should go a long way in terms of making this work more accessible and more importantly: more immediate. I didn’t think about mobile when originally developing these, but being able to run what is essentially live-composited video smoothly over cellular data really allows for much more direct experiential feedback.

What’s next? I have a whole batch of new ideas I’ve already shot video and/or written code for. They’re all pretty different and therefore continue the idea of Repeaters as artistic research, but what they have in common is taking up where I left off with my experiments with stop motion and really thinking about what types of compositing bring about that uncanny feeling that one is actually interacting with photorealistic scenes rather than anything that could be done with standard video post-production. In other words, they’ve come a long way from simply manipulating the speed of single channel video loops :)

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Stalker (after Tarkovsky)

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The final scene from one of my favorite films, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I’m about to recreate this as part of a project for my other blog repeaters

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Sausage Making 2012

Today, I made a project that combines my repeaters with the wonderful New York Times Campaign Finance API. Called Sausage Making 2012, it visualizes the total campaign contributions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as the speed at which meat is ground— evoking the famous quote, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made,” often falsely attributed to Otto von Bismarck, but likely first written by the American poet John Godfrey Saxe.

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Unfortunately, this one is no longer live since the Times pulled their campaign finance API after the election. I'm checking to see if they'll be making a new version for this election cycle, but seems a little late by now. They have one for tracking congressional votes, though, so I might fuck around with that instead.

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Apropos: "Long and short intervals of a flickering lamp in a Varanasi garage, reciting in Morse forward and backward the Rigveda X, 158, 4-5: 'Give sight onto the eye, give thou our bodies sight that they may see: May we survey, discern this world. Thus, Surya, may we look on thee, on thee most lovely to behold.'"

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flamingo mating dance

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cloudbusting

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birds on wire

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votive

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single tail

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fdr

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bubbles

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