What are Slidvids & Aleph Nullisms?
Jim Andrews
March 2021
Recently, I published on my site a series of 21 visual poems by the Toronto visual poet Daniel Bradley called “erogenous zones”. The images are displayed in a slideshow program I wrote called Slidvid. I call it Slidvid because I usually use it for something between slideshow and video (though not in this case). Also, it’s video slid to the condition in which I render it.
Daniel Bradley’s original images →
As you can read in the piece itself, Daniel says “These poems, erogenous zones, started as a way to use up old Letraset sheets I had left over from the early 1990’s.” So they do indeed have an interesting ‘materiality’ to them. You won’t mistake them for work done in Illustrator or Photoshop or another purely digital realm. But they are not without strong relation to the digital, it seems, not only because they look so good on a screen. One of the interesting things about my collaborations with the poets bill bissett and Jim Leftwich is that their work is so non-digital, for the most part. So touchy feely, sometimes, of print or other art materials. To then work with it in generative software situates it between the digital and analog.
Some Slidvid tech pointers. If you mouse the bottom of the screen of Daniel’s slideshow, a menu will appear. You can get info on the Bradley images if you click the ‘burger icon’, ie, the one with three horizontal lines. You can zoom in/out with the mouse wheel, if you have a mouse. If you’re on mobile, tap and hold to zoom. Double tap and hold to zoom out. You can use the space key to pause/play. Use the f key or the [ ] button to toggle fullscreen. My art wants every pixel of your screen. It is definitely pixel-greedy. And it is also mouse-happy. Mouse around and see what happens. I build my stuff to be interactive cuz I really love interactive art. Some people can’t stand it, I know. For them, I try to make my stuff so they can just look at it or read it or whatever.
Aleph Null is what I call a graphic synthesizer. I wrote Aleph Null in JavaScript/HTML/CSS. It’s online. It’s an interactive, generative, online image and animation dynamo for creating unique images synthetic of a folder of images that you ‘feed’ to Aleph Null. I ‘fed’ Daniel f Bradley’s “erogenous zones” to Aleph Null.
Here’s a slideshow of 156 screenshots of that grisly scene →
I like to show both the original images and the Aleph Nullisms obtained from Aleph Null gnoshing on the work. The project is not just about the results of Aleph Null chewing on things. It’s about the whole thing. That’s more interesting than simple concentration on the results of the software process.
Here’s the never-the-same-twice dynamic, generative engine at work →
It starts immediately. It eventually downloads all the Bradley images and proceeds to collage them all. Plus it downloads a few of the screenshots of Aleph Null chewing on Daniel, toward the end of the download. So it is both a cutup and a cutup of cutups of Daniel’s work.
And here’s a straight video of an Aleph Null session on “erogenous zones.”
Here’s an Aleph Null session mixing Daniel f Bradley and Jim Leftwich.
I also did an Aleph Null session of mixing Daniel Bradley’s work with bill bissett’s work and made a video of it. They’re both Toronto visual poets and I’m a Canuck from Vancouver, so this one the Canadians like.
Aleph Null 4.0 will include all of the above material. There will also be collaborations with Kirill Azernyy, bill bissett, Jim Leftwich, Adeena Karasick, Alchemical Cosmography, and much more. Aleph Null is one of the most innovative online magazines while not being a magazine at all. Here are links to the first three versions/issues of Aleph Null:
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Jim Andrews is a net artist, poet, programmer, visual and audio artist, mathematician and essayist. He has been publishing vispo.com since 1996. He completed a degree in English and Mathematics at the U of Victoria in Canada in 1983. He then produced a literary radio show called Fine Lines and, later, ?FRAME? for six years that he distributed each week to 15 campus/community stations in Canada.
Encountering the radio art and theoretical writing of Gregory Whitehead and the other ‘audio writers’, together with the work of McLuhan and a kind of mentorship from Seattle’s Joe Keppler and margareta waterman, showed him the importance of understanding one’s medium, understanding the artistic possibilities of the specific properties of one’s media/um.
After producing the radio show, he went back to school and studied Computer Science and Mathematics. After that, it wasn’t long before the web emerged, which Andrews saw as the perfect media/um for someone seeking to combine writing, programming, visual and audio art in an international scene of epistolary correspondence about the art and poetics and sharing online of the art itself.
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