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Matrixel
Matrixel
This has been somewhat a pet project of mine, ever since I first conceived it. Every once in a while I go back to this piece of art, and it never fails to intrigue me.
Imagine yourself taking a picture of your old car with a digital camera. You connect the camera to a computer and transfer the photo to photoshop (or some other sort of image viewer). Looking at the photo you will see, besides the old car, a bunch of pixels. So you are actually not viewing the car, but a bunch of pixels; pixels with different colors, forming a pattern. Try zooming into the picture and you will see that this is true.
The picture of you old car is, in computer language, said to be shown in a resolution. Whenever you are working with a computer and looking at a monitor, you are viewing graphics shown in a resolution. Today a lot of people configure their computers so that they are working with a high resolution; maybe 1024 x 800 pixels and millions of colors. This resolution gives us colors^(1024 x 800) number of different combinations, that can be shown in the resolution. You can also put it this way: there is colors^(1024 x 800) number of pictures, to be shown in this resolution. Nothing's strange about that. Now, let's say that we go through all the possible combinations of pixels (actually colors) that this resolution provide us with. Except the fact that this would take some time (a long time) we would sooner or later see everything that a computer with 1024 x 800 pixels can show. Consider the consequences. Let's say you go out and take a whole lot of pictures with your digital camera, using resolution 1024 x 800. Now, whatever picture you take, one would see the exact same picture just looking at the computer cycling through all the possible combinations. So eventually, all the pictures that you took with your camera would show up.
Even the pictures that you have never taken would show up; sooner or later. So you would not see only the photos which you have taken, you would also see that which has never been captured on camera. This could as for an example be when you had your first ice-cream, or maybe you going watching a movie. You would even see yourself being eaten by an alien or being taught math by an alien.
When realizing the idea through a computer program, some puzzling questions arises. As for an example, how many possible images is there in the universe? Well when presented in black and white and on the average computer screen there are 2^(1024 x 800) possible images. How many of those have you already seen and how many do you have left to see? How many images portray events that have not and will not occur? Are there more or less, compared to events that have taken place or will take place? Is it a balance between the two and if so, then why? On how many of the images will you see your own face?
Can you think of something that would not show up on the screen? Pretty strange isn't it!
Above is a computer program that realizes the matrixel idea. This is how the application works. The resolution is broken down and crammed into a long binary sequence. During the execution the sequence is filled with either 1 or 0, where 1 represents white and 0 is black. The first image is represented by the entire sequence being filled with zeros, but the last one which is 1; 000…001. When the next image is to be rendered 1 is added and according to the 2 base math system, this means that the entire sequence will be filled with zeros, except for the second one for the one which will be a 1; 000…010. The next image will be 000…011 and so forth.
If you enjoyed this page you might want to have a look at this:
Divine Matter,
Hive.
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