This was another experiment as part of the sonemics project. This is not a performance, but rather a live algorithm. I took one of the film clips from sonemics I, a close up shot of one of the table surfaces, and made a JavaScript line-tracing object in Jitter, to trace paths around the zig-zag lines of the the table top pattern. In the video here, you can see three instances of the line-tracing – single pixel white dots starting in the top left corner of the frame, and gradually zig-zagging their way around, making random decisions about changes of direction once they collide with a ‘wall’ in the pattern. This is made complicated by the changing frames of the movie as it plays back – sometimes the playback stops, which let’s the line-tracers do their stuff, but then they become thwarted by the shifting edges of the moving frames. The motion is mapped straightforwardly to a basic MSP synth patch to create a little audiovisual automaton. It was a kind of coda for the City Halls show in Glasgow.
