This piece’s title comes from a line in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I found it a bit hard going in places, but it ended so strongly that I forgave it for making me work a little to get there.
Anyway, for this month I’ve made an extreme durational piece. The first time you run it you will be presented with a single image. From then on, each (real-world) day you run it the image will be re-saved in jpeg format with gradually decreasing quality settings. Once you have run it for 356 days and the image is no longer recognisable, a new image will present itself and the process will start over.
There are 16 images in this piece. If you want to engage with it as intended, it will require a commitment of 16 years of your life.
Download a smile, risen on the dark face of the sky
Controls: escape: quit
The Rules:
The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (02/05/20).
All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
All source code and assets are included, licensed under the GPL (code) and CC-BYSA (assets).
As long as you abide by those licenses, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
Have you ever come across the conspiracy theories surrounding Andrew WK? They’re wild (CW: violence, possible serious mental health problems?, brainwashing?, STEEV MIKE).
I’ve linked to Mark Fisher’s work before, but The Sydney Review of Books recently published a fascinating 3-part discussion of the blogosphere in which so much of his work was born. Parts one, two, three.
Slides from a session at the 2019 p5.js Contributors’ Conference titled how to write non violent creative code, surfacing a lot of issues that I think get overlooked a lot when we think about code and programming. There’s certainly a lot here that I have tended to overlook in my own practice, and need to do better about.
I read Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January this month, a story about magic doors, colonialism, and people struggling desperately across years and vast distances to find their way home. A tiny excerpt:
“If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.”
Then I read her short story The Sycamore and the Sybil, about trees and witches and patriarchal violence (CW: sexual coercion/assault, suicidal ideation), which led me to this interview she did over at Uncanny, which itself led me to this poem about a Sycamore by Wendell Berry. Particularly these lines, which caught me up short:
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it.
A beautiful coda to The Simpsons, Family Guy and King of the Hill, highlighting just how much the dysfunctional family description commonly applied to the first two provides cover for behaviour that would be genuinely disturbing if they weren’t cartoons (CW: discussions of abuse).
I’ve only got one link to share about COVID-19 and the collective isolation (I assume) we’re all undertaking as a result. To be honest I imagine we’ve all been reading the same things anyway. A whole lot of anxiety out there right now.
That said, Harry Josephine Giles has written about what it means for the arts sector, and come up with some demands for what needs to happen at the other end of this crisis. The arts sector was already riven with serious structural inequalities before the crisis hit. It will be disastrous if our response to the crisis is to just go back to the way things were once it’s abated.
Sorry. Looking back at what I’ve just written that’s a whole lot of content warnings and difficult discussions. Given current circumstances that’s probably not what you need right now. Feel free to put those links to one side and come back when the world isn’t imploding.
I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you’re looking after yourself and your loved ones and staying inside as much as possible. I hope you don’t have to worry about money. I hope you don’t have to worry about food, or toilet paper. I hope you don’t have to worry about keeping a roof over your head. I hope you’re building support networks and figuring out how to get by in these unsettling times.
I’m not great at this stuff, but I’m trying to get better. If you need someone to talk to you can DM me on twitter or email me at niall@niallmoody.com.