Lofa: The things which I have seen
Footage of my screen playing one of my earliest AI video experiments, made with Runway Gen-2 in 2023. The image I used in the prompt is broken now so it can't be made again. This recording is what's left and it rots in its own way, like 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 off my computer screen on a circuit-bent camera made by Dawnia Darkstone (Letsglitchit) that writes corrupted files in camera. On screen is an AI video I made with Runway Gen-2 in 2023.
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, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, 1807. 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: The source is an early AI video I made with Runway Gen-2 in 2023. Claude (Anthropic) wrote the code that runs the piece to my direction. It also helped check the poem sources. The colour, poem choices and every creative decision are mine. No AI model runs in the piece. The glitch is computed live from the footage.
Credits: Camera by Dawnia Darkstone (Letsglitchit). Source video made with Runway Gen-2. 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.
