The WorkThere was a lot of talk at the end of the 80's when post-modernism was emerging about how we've reached the end of imaging ... and I wanted to show that even in a simple 32-by-32 space, the possibilities for imaging were vast.Both Simon's Every Icon and Ken Goldberg's Memento Mori use simple interfaces--a grid, and a pulse--to attempt to express what is nearly unimaginable. In several trillion years, you might start to see something that looks like an arrow, or a square. You would arrive at something that was a skewed square, and then a few trillion years later it would be straight, and then a few trillion years later it would be crooked.If it is impossible to comprehend "a couple trillion years," it is almost as difficult to imagine the earth "breathing" in and out approximately .0005 millimeters ever couple of seconds. Let's see, in a couple of trillion years, the earth will have moved ... |
The concept behind this piece is elegant. It also evokes some of the elements of Desktops
that I love. Every Icon does not just parse through every icon, but every
meaning, from ASCII to ideograms to copyright symbols, every element of our
net language is possibly there. --cl
John Simon's Every Icon is an algorithmic composition that
will take billions of years to display every icon
configuration in a 32 x 32 grid. This work
goes way beyond the scale of human
existence.
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