PACK ⬕ Sandpile Auto

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This pack contains 290 VJ loops (138 GB)

I think that cellular automata feels like a decomposing computer. Crumbling eroding collapsing data that is trying to escape entropy. Bleeding pixels.

Every so often I poke around Github and search for my favorite topics to see what obscure passion projects are around. Naturally I did a search for cellular automata and stumbled across Utomata. What an amazing ecosystem this is to explore and jam with. Somewhere in the process I became curious about one specific cellular automata algorithm and finally nailed down that it was the Abelian sandpile model that I found so curious. Researching that topic led me to the WebGl Sandpile Simulation webpage, which was endless fun to play with. Self-organized criticality is so bizarre and fascinating to watch. I ended up using OBS to record my screen and disabled the cursor from being visible so that I could interactively play with the simulation while recording, which was a boon. I was showing a friend what I was working on and they asked if I made it using Visions of Chaos. I hadn't checked out that software in years and so I downloaded and played with a few of its cellular automata algorithms. I love experimenting with new software, especially when it was originally built for research.

After recording all of the footage, I took everything into After Effects and keyed out specific colors so that it could be a bit more dramatic and pleasing to look at. Adding some red hot glow FX was a perfect match for these broken pixels. Ouch I really made a big chore for myself in just hitting record and telling myself I'll just edit the various clips later. Also scaling up these render is such a pain since I want to use the nearest neighbor scaling algorithm since it preserves the hard edges of the pixels and so that limits me to the AE draft quality, which changes how some FX appear at render time. After experimenting with loads of different FX and nothing was sticking, I realized that the cellular automata was already so beautiful in itself and so I didn't mess with it further. But right when I was wrapping things up I was curious to see what happened when I datamoshed the footage in dd_GlitchAssist and holy smokes it was instant gold.

I was unhappily surprised by the sheer size of this pack. I believe that since cellular automata sometimes approaches textures that look like noise, it can be difficult for the H264 codec to encode the frame sequence. But I'm not willing to sacrifice picture quality just to reduce the file sizes, so alas! Computers are a temporary moat against the creeping bit rot that always approaches.