https://github.com/toomanybees/memento-mori
https://github.com/toomanybees/memento-mori
Last synced: 8 months ago
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- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/toomanybees/memento-mori
- Owner: TooManyBees
- Created: 2025-01-03T20:26:44.000Z (over 1 year ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2025-03-09T21:41:43.000Z (over 1 year ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-03-09T22:26:52.674Z (over 1 year ago)
- Language: Rust
- Size: 8.22 MB
- Stars: 0
- Watchers: 1
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
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README
# Memento Mori
This repository is a meditation on death.
Not the resulting computer program, the project itself.
The water in your body is just visiting.
It was a thunderstorm a week ago.
It will be an ocean soon enough.
Most of your cells come and go like morning dew.
We are more weather pattern than stone monument.
Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning.
Your Choices outweight your substance.
Anderson, Jarod. "Naming the River." Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, Crooked Wall Press, 2020. p. 6.
I wanted to make art about death that reflects how I see life. The summarized version is:
* Life is chaos that cleverly shapes *itself* into something that looks orderly, but isn't.
* Life is a ~highway~ pattern. Chaotic systems can fall into patterns without being ordered.
* Actual order is death. A thing that is stable can't break out of a cycle.
* Life is more the signal than the medium (the same way that music travels on sound through the air, but music is not the air).
* Life is a wave that travels through matter.
* Like any wave that carries a signal, not only can the signal fade, but it can be completely lost in noise. Both of these are kinds of deaths.
I take inspiration from two videos.
A few years ago, I crossed paths with this video on a social media feed, part of the Journey to the Microcosmos series: [This Ciliate is About to Die (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0). It's 10 minutes long. I found it moving. It explores death, and by contrast what constitutes life. The video focuses on a specific theme, a definition of life as a system that uses its energy to keep itself from reaching equilibrium, and the complementary definition of death as the moment when the system stops working. Given how I think about life, I didn't need convincing to believe this.
Some time later, on that same social media feed, I stumbled upon [Don Hopkins's CAM6 Demo (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck), a video in which Don Hopkins, with overflowing enthusiasm, demonstrates his web browser simulator for the [Cam-6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam-6). The Cam-6 is a computer expansion board from the 1980s, designed to run [cellular automata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata). Don's narration doesn't slow down for such trivialities as "what is a cellular automaton?", and his focus never stays in the same place long enough to explain much anyway, but one thing you need to know about me is that I love anyone eagerly talking shop about something they love.
The important part comes 5 minutes in, when Don says "[Rudy Rucker](https://www.rudyrucker.com) came up with a nifty idea of combining Brian's Brain together with Life and one called Anneal…". The name "Life" comes from the act of likening each cell of the ceullular automata to part of a population, but as I watched the video I saw a visual metaphor of a single organism taking in energy from an environment while shedding itself back into that environment, and I began to draw some parallels.
I want to think a bit about systems that make patterns out of chaos without taming it, and the semi-arbitrary distinctions that most of us make between life and death, between "somethings" that are a part of a system and other "somethings" that aren't part of a system, and the moment when we change our determination about what is or isn't alive.
I also want to make art that River would have loved to watch while stoned out of their mind. So here we are.
## Experiments in dissolving myself
### Variations on a theme
## How to run this program
~You can't, because I haven't released `rust-nite2`. Sucks to be youuuu~ OMIGOD FINE.
To run it with a PrimeSense device attached, you'll probably need to drop the contents of OpenNI2's and NiTE2's redist folders into the working dir.
https://structure.io/openni/
https://archive.org/details/ni-te
To run it without a PrimeSense device, build with `--no-default-features`.
It'll run like absolute crap if you don't compile with `--release`.
### Controls
Mouse 1: Paint "live" state.
Mouse 2: Paint ruleset.
Mouse Wheel: Changes size of mouse cursor.
Tab: Cycles through rulesets. Current ruleset applies to painting with Mouse 2, and the temporary ruleset of a detected body.
Ctrl: Hold the key down to see a transparent overlay of rulesets.
R: Randomizes state of the entire board.
U: Enable and disable body detection. When body detection is disabled, it commits the temporary ruleset to the board.
G: Enable and disable growth.
C: Clear state of the board.
Esc: Clear state of the board, and clear all rulesets.
N: Start recording up to 150 frames to disk; also, stop recording if it hasn't finished yet.
Enter: Pause and resume the simulation.
Space: Advance the simulation by one frame.
## Notes for me
```bash
gifsicle --delay 10 --loop --resize 256x_ --resize-method sample memento-mori_*.gif > "mm-$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).gif"
```