Lofa: Rememberable things
Footage of an old coaster I misplaced while moving home. It was shaped like an orange with a small smiley face and it greeted me in my studio every morning for a couple of years. Reaching for it was how the work started each day. When I first picked it up, I didn't expect it to become such a glimmer of joy. I don't have it any more and I miss it. This footage is what's left. It rots in its own way and so does my memory of it.
Interaction: Click and drag (hold and draw on a phone) to smear the image and drag a slice of it across the frame. Pale frames lock onto the parts rotting fastest. Each stroke carries a line of poetry about memory. When you let go the line holds long enough to read, then burns into the picture and decays with it.
Source: Filmed on a circuit-bent camera made by Dawnia Darkstone (Letsglitchit) that writes corrupted files in camera.
Process: Recoloured in my illustration palette, then glitched in a seeded datamosh engine I designed and built with Claude. Motion keeps running after the keyframes are gone so the picture chews into itself. Each loop decays from a damaged first frame and slowly rebuilds it. The clean footage never appears.
Text: 40 snippets from poets published between 1595 and 1915, chosen for words like decay, file, break and corrupt that read differently now. Each was checked against its source and is public domain in the US, Ireland, the UK and the EU.
Title: from Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805. The line is one of the piece's snippets. It appears on the first stroke and returns more often than the others.
Technical: One self-contained HTML file. It makes no network calls, crops to any screen and sets its resolution to the device. The decay is seeded. The marks and poems depend on the viewer, so no two viewings are the same.
AI: Claude (Anthropic) wrote the code that runs the piece to my direction. It also helped check the poem sources. The footage, colour, poem choices and every creative decision are mine. No AI model generates any image or text in the piece. The glitch is computed live from my footage.
Credits: Camera by Dawnia Darkstone (Letsglitchit). Code written with Claude by Anthropic. Poetry is public domain. VT323 typeface by Peter Hull, SIL Open Font License. mp4box.js by GPAC, BSD 3-Clause licence.
