[NetBehaviour] The Life Still of Still Lives

[Alan Sondheim]

The Life Still of Still Lives

The video is silent.

https://youtu.be/5M9qwdS2O6A Video
http://www.alansondheim.org/vb.jpg

Slow meandering perhaps scan, perhaps run through. Don't worry
about the error messages; they're built into the piece; it's
video screen capture all the way.

Perhaps 2010, perhaps earlier: A series of still images churned
and dis/placed through Visual Basic programming; the images are
shifted and rastered through mathematical manipulation allowing
the appearance at times of text, at other times, interference,
at other times, reworking almost entirely. The process can take
between a few seconds and close, I believe, to an hour or more;
who knows. Completed a long time ago, they run poorly now, but I
have been able to get enough of a restoration to give one the
idea of the parts of the whole of the parts. Some of the pieces
were designed to be impossible to remove from the desktop; only
by rebooting would they disappear. The whole of the video lasts
36' 31" and I suggest you run this in the background or skip
around the various sections - you might miss something. The
video begins rather minimalist only by chance; I ran through the
series in alphabetic order. There is no sound. I am utterly
please with what I achieved - the appearance of glitch, but its
exact opposite - in fact all of this is determinate. In some, I
could stop the progression at any point and restarting would
create new interferences. In others, that would be the end of
the progression. You can see I had to close most of them by
force or what passes for force on the computer; others quietly
ended their run as if frozen. Oddly I have no memory of the
mathematics or programming I used to create these; I'm
fascinated that they seem like living creatures with minds of
their own.


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