A98point4 (2014)

An audiovisual artwork presented as a short film at the Drone Cinema Film Festival in Leiden, Netherlands. This is a follow on work to ‘Embryogenesis’ using a similar connection between composed video and generative audio output. The video analysis was changed, the synthesis module was a complete rewrite, and the fitness function of the genetic algorithm was adapted to work with those changes.

A98.4 is the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) code for the Ebola Virus Disease. At the time that I created this for the film festival, the Ebola virus was back in the news and I had been travelling a good bit. Watching the news while sitting in airports made me think about how diseases are communicated, how they replicate, mutate… In other words, I thought about how their own ‘genetic algorithm’ worked.

Viruses are such small pieces of genetic information, changing through self-replication and simultaneously causing disease, decay, and death in their hosts. Biologically encoded data corrupting other biologically encoded data. I find this to be an interesting area to consider and this piece is a rather slow, tense, meditation on those thoughts.