the weekend shorts

made from discarded raw material from "nothing hurts, and you won't be"

'life/like' stages varied technological imitations of nature, and investigates the degree to which nature-as-symbol has itself evolved into algorithmic process. Utilizing the open source creative coding library p5.js, the outermost channels of video run through handmade javascript expressions modeling a spirograph and Brownian motion, respectively. The movement of the three video channels interact as interlaced found footage blends natural symbology with rote pattern, algorithmic generation, and most importantly, the visualization of both nature and technology’s operational mechanisms. These representations are themselves inevitably crude and ineffectual, yet the border at which human knowledge attempts to integrate the natural or the techno-natural into its empirical organization is the onus of potential change. In time, the competing images crescendo into a virtual reality landscape, deeply artificial yet singular in its affective potential: a parallel nature, a transhumanist Eden.

A man is confronted with the necrophilic reality of his obsession as the object of his desire is killed. A love affair with the image of a woman is an eventual commitment to the dissolution of her mortal body. Is man's obsessive union with the feminine ideal impossible? Does the violence by which it operates prohibit it from moral purity? As romantic fulfillment falls short of its remedial promise and feminine symbols are abstracted from bodies, what are you willing to sacrifice for beauty?

The world is overflowing with sadness. People are surrounded by emptiness, and loneliness has filled their hearts. / If it's that painful, you can stop. / If you really don't like it, you can run away. / Do you want to be at ease? To feel at peace? Do you want to become one with me? To have our bodies and souls become one? / But if I have to be with you, I'd rather die! / Don't worry. All living things have the ability to return to their original form, and for the heart to go on living. / Reality does involve pain, but you just have to accept it. / Anywhere can be heaven as long as you have the will to live.

display for sherae's "image" assignment