256 Kill-Screen #82

Daniel Catt’s animated work “256 Kill-Screen" poses the question “what if the World Wide Web was never invented and computer bulletin board systems (BBS) were the dominant interface of the internet?”

There is a lineage of faces rendered with ASCII text which includes Waldemar Cordeiro’s print of The Woman Who is Not B.B. (A mulher que não é B.B.) from 1973. Catt’s contemporary work builds on the computer interface directly, embracing its dynamic movement as well as the glitches inherent to it.

The colorful text can be traced to an infamous glitch in the 256th level of the original Pac-Man game. An 8-bit integer with a fixed range of 0-255 is used to count the current level, but the 8-bit counter for the game’s fruit element is 1 higher. This means that the fruit counter overflows on level 256, causing the game’s visual output to devolve into random characters.

Layers of modern digital tools were used to construct “256 Kill-Screen," each influencing the next. Initially, a story was generated using ChatGPT (GPT-4). It was told to “imagine itself as the BBC Micro (an 8-bit home computer) user guide attempting to escape from hell, using the BASIC coding language as a method to open a portal to this world.” The resulting story was then converted into a Markov chain, a type of stochastic model which can be used for word prediction in a manner common to modern text messaging. The ChatGPT story is also fed into Midjourney and DALL-E 2—image generators powered by artificial intelligence—to create hundreds of outputs. These outputs are converted into raw data contained in Javascript files which can be read by the artwork script. The final artwork builds on these images and displays new stories using the Markov chain while being slowly corrupted and repaired over time.

“N=12 is an experiment in building intentional community, with 12 artists collaborating across seven time zones. Contemporary computer-based artists create their work while connected to an effectively infinite network of information. This affords artists the capacity for infinite input and collaboration, leaving them to distill these disparate connections and experiences into their artwork. Distinctly, the computer artist’s principal tool for creation is also a means for connection. This exhibition leans into the inherent proximity of computer users by explicitly asking 12 artists to create work while in constant dialogue with one another. These artists convened and collaborated online over several months, sharing their code and artistic processes while fostering a co-creative microcosm enriched by weekly meetings, aesthetic critiques, code reviews, and vibrant discussion.” — Aaron Penne