Code for the end of the world.

The last few months, i’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time watching how this birds were coded, asking about the most basic things about Linux andmaking some absurd statements to describe LISP , the language used to create them. Dan Torop is the crazy brain behind this real time simulation of the Bowery ca 1997, as Dan likes to describe. I remember they started as triangles with visible axis and they suddenly became this strange flock of glassy birds. You can control the flock, the color of the sky, the camera and other physics with a game controler, like his previous amazing Ocean. I also experiment for the first time the process of actualling seeing how code “became” something else: there is no need to point out the esoterism of this line! (i know, specially coming for a background in animation and video, where you are limited by interfaces and timelines)

Bowery Birds 6/17/08 from Dan Torop on Vimeo.

Last night i went to see “Antartica Encounters at the End of the World” by Werner Herzog wich remind a lot, the photography work i’ve seen of Dan - whom before starting to code again, was a already pretty damn good photographer-. Anyway, both in relation with nature and the use of technology to represent it, i finally connect this image with the Birds of the Bowery, and remind me too, that i should (must) do something with code.

Again, the end of the world gets better and better.

This round of residents was so incredibly inspiring in Eyebeam (Jamie Allen, Joo Youn Paek, Tai Yoon Cho, Joseph Delappe, Andrew Patterson and Joe Winter) but i’m going to the birds a lot!

Well, at least Dan left us in the lab hooked to WFMU, to survive late nights of work to come.