Animal Locomotion

Welcome to the part of your mind of slipping pandemic sanity, the inherent craving for curiosity, and follow us to a place where we can strum our stagnant heart strings.—SB

Brendan Yandt & Eilish Rodden, Sequence
Canada, 2021, 0:13, 1.5 MB, processing time 0:13

Brendan Yandt & Eilish Rodden start off our journey as we descend into a community we could only hope to understand. Sink into the depths of the natural world while we listen to the trees sing.—SB

Pierre Leichner, Worm Art Work #9 (Foot Print Series #1)
Canada, 2021, 4:54, 4 MB

Animal wrangler Pierre Leichner returns, this time collaborating with compost nematodes! Ingeniously demarcating footprints with insecticide (worms avoid), the artists places harmless-ink-dipped worms in the negative space, where their multicolored wriggling produces mini-Pollocks. Meanwhile, addressing us humans with schoolmarmish disapproval, the worms warn us to hurry up and mend our earth-destroying ways.—LM

Sunny Nestler, Cone Worms (Near Burrard Inlet)
Canada, 2021, 1:51

Burrard Inlet hosts a dazzling performance of technicolor cone worms featuring the Double Somersault, the Ouroboros, the Diseappearing Palm Tree and much, much more.

byteobserver, Glow in the Dark Slime
Canada, 2021, 44-byte JPEG-XL file executed as a PNG image

This is a 44 byte JPEG-XL file. JPEG-XL is a new standard for
image encoding which is quickly gaining acceptance. It contains some
interesting features such as a programmable predictive coding engine.
This image is created by programming such a predictor (known as a tree).
There is no actual image data present, hence why the file size is so
small. Since not all browsers and image viewers can handle JPEG-XL yet,
an equivalent but *much* larger PNG image is also included.

Snail tracks left by a performance of code! This image is created by programming a predictive coding engine. There is no actual image data present, hence why the file size is so small.

byteobserver, daemon 45
Canada, 2021, x86 Linux executable music, 2:55

Rustles and bleeps like demons in a microscopic pinball machine unpack from a 45-byte executable file for Linux that calculates a long sequence of data based on the x86 time stamp counter and prints the data to standard input. Piped to an audio player, this data produces generative noise music that varies quite significantly based on how many cycles the CPU has executed since power-on.

The video playing in the program is a screen capture of the executable file in action.

Clayton Windatt, Hot Bugs; I Live Under; The Festival; Missing You; Really Fast Horror Movie
Canada, series length 5:32, series size 5.3 MB

Legs of vermin cross paths as a neo-noir soundscape is briefly interrupted by folly before fading out. A horror between the frames. A lone figure transpires the void. Hands reaching from the primordial at the end. – JM

Joe Rzodkiewicz, Oh Rats
0:13, 3.9 MB