5-in-5 Day 2

sean
sean
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

For day 2 of 5-in-5 I made a series of stills of bytes input as starting data for cellular automata. I was focusing on ideas of irreversibleness and how insurrectionary process carries within it the seeds of its defeat, from The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection:

The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated both authority and the need for authority, property and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary process carries within itself the form of its victory, or that of its defeat. Destruction has never been enough to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly provoke the return of what has been crushed. Whoever wastes their energy on the corpse of an order can be sure that this will arouse the desire for vengeance. Thus, wherever the economy is blocked and the police are neutralized, it is important to invest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing the authorities. They must be deposed with the most scrupulous indifference and derision.

With this, I took the first sentence of this paragraph, transformed it into bytes, and used those bytes as the starting generation for a 1D Cellular Automata with a random ruleset. By randomizing the ruleset this makes the process of reconstructing the bytes from the images non-trivial, though possible.

A few of the screens created from bytes of the data from The Invisible Committee text

In the end, I took this data and created a gif from it, because that seemed like the best way to visually represent the data in it’s static form as part of a whole.

Gif of the final screens (https://media.giphy.com/media/bEcsNldyGeq06f6GXv/giphy.gif)

The project was made in Processing and started with Wolfram example from processing.org, here. This was then altered to take custom data read in from a text file as the starting generation, with zeroes being “off” and ones being “on.”

The code can be found here.

sean

Written by

sean

im the guy who sucks. plus i got depression. http://twotabsofacid.com

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade