flicker

Yay! It’s complete!

I’ve finished writing my first piece of generative art for a long time.  I wrote about my plans recently.

Not surprisingly, I used Processing, and took an OOP approach (Object Oriented Programming), to represent four loops of film, each projecting a square of colour, slightly overlapping with the next one,on a blank wall, and with each loop containing only plain coloured frames, but with one frame in each loop a pure black to create a flickering effect.

I call it Flicker, and it’s based on the 1975 work ‘Shutter Interface‘ by Paul Sharits, as described in ‘Brian Eno: Visual Music’ by Christopher Scoates:

The films are all out of phase/sync and therefore a multitude of variational states of interactions between them is set in (potentially perpetual) motion. For Sharits, the fades and dissolves were “‘active’ punctuation for the ‘sentences’ being visually enunciated” and in their variable syntax recall a Chomskyan notion of grammar.”

I’d like to post the sketch so you can see it running, but it doesn’t work in Javascript mode, so here’s a still from my sketch, though, being a still image, it entirely misses the point of the flickering. You’ll just have to image a brief interruption of each square at random intervals:

Tags: processing