I've been interested in the idea of paintings-that-move since I first encountered Eno's video work but this is the first time I've considered the possibility of drawings-that-move. How might such a thing be different from a) paintings-that-move, b) screen savers, c) traditional cel animation, and d) abstract film as shown in the Dada and Visual Music exhibitions?

In this case, aside from the obvious formal properties of being linear and b/w, they also have a sense of being fuctionally and conceptually stripped-down. I felt like I was watching Brandon think through the algorythms he was writing so as to figure out what their implications might be - analagous to a painter working out a problems through preperatory study.

Sadly, the most significant piece of writing DC could muster was a brief review by Heather Goss on DCist. I agree with her assessment that CPUs building the pieces anew on each cycle would have been preferable to DVD loops, though I suspect her notion that 'mega-computers' would be requred is exaggerated - a stack of MacMinis and efficient OpenGL code could probably generate the same results [Brandon?]

Anyway, Brandon's work deserves a longer discussion, particularly along the lines of how culture [both high and low] is incorporating the notion of simulation. In the realm of pop culture we see it in The Matrix, Sim City, and soon, Spore. In 'High' culture, works like Brandon's will be historical placeholders, identifying a point in history when our capacity to explore all possible [and impossible] states of a finite system became aestheticised, even sexy. Why settle for one state when you can have them all? But that's a discussion better left to an academic or critic, not a practitioner. The bibliography to that paper should include Kevin Kelly's lecture on the future of scientific method, which discusses sims as a recently added third prong [in addation to data collection and hypothesis] to the way science does business.