Code 09: The flock that followed me home

Boids again. If you have been on the homepage you have met them, spelling my name, bumping into each other. This is where they came from.

That autumn I was drawing every night, ink and code in the same hour, and The Nature of Code lay open on the couch like a hymn book. I made one dot move. Then I made it want something, a target, a place to arrive. Then I gave it company and taught the company to keep a little distance from each other, which is the whole social contract in about forty lines. I called that one Obey, because it was supposed to gather on the word OBEY in big letters like the Shepard Fairey posters, and the letters never showed up. The dots did.

Look at them. They are the same creatures I draw with a pen when I am on hold: a body, a direction, a slight worry about the neighbours.

Then they went out

A dot that behaves gets invited places. The same little flock went to a gig with a musician friend, to a basement show where the projector was too warm to touch, to a festival wall where it had to listen to a mixer through a cable I soldered that afternoon. Every time I opened the last copy, added whatever the room needed (a microphone, a way for the musician's machine to talk to mine, a feed out to the projector) and saved it under the venue's name. The copies are all still here. Reading them back is like reading old letters: the handwriting changes, the person does not.

One of them lives with a depth camera, so the flock parts around a body standing in front of it. I never showed that one. It was for me, in an apartment, waving.

What I would tell the person who drew them

Nothing. He was doing fine. He spent one whole evening convinced the software was broken because he had set to zero the number that means how hard you are allowed to turn, and the dots could not turn. That was a good evening. Frustration, a cigarette on the balcony, the fix at one in the morning, the dots turning.

Where they are now

On the homepage, spelling my name. On a pitch last summer, spelling someone else's. In the last post, wearing the populations of fifty animals as a costume. Same flock. It followed me home one autumn and never left, and of everything in this folder that is the thing I am proudest of. I made something that stayed.

The old files, if you like reading letters: processing-archive/agents.

Previously: ← Code 37: For Love of Animals  ·  The first dots, in the moment: Code 05