Exploring Poundstone's Project for Tachistoscope [Bottomless Pit]

Here are some quick initial code asset and visualization explorations, before we get into more sophisticated questions that are specific to the work and its variability.

Flash

An archived version of the original flash file compared to a "remix" version with substituted text assets referring to the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill incident (remix by Mark Marino).

Movie

A Quicktime movie version of a complete traversal of the text, so that you can scrub, freezeframe etc. and see what is happening with the subliminal frames. Note that in the Flash original after, the last frame of the movie, the text "loops around" and it keeps playing ad infinitum -- the text loop time is about 9 minutes, and this is where I cut the film (after the last word). However the graphics and logo stream does *not* loop at the same rate in Flash, so the background image stream is different underneath the text even as it repeats.

Montage of Frames

This montage is 199*177, showing 24 frames a second for the duration of a complete loop of the Botomless Pit text. The montage reads like a page, left-right, top-bottom.

Timeline (Reslice)

This timeline is comprised of a single line of pixels taken from each frame in the piece. The pixels were taken from the center of the work (indicate by the yellow line):

Each line is laid on its side, and the lines proceed from left to right, from the beginning to the end of a full text run. Colored bands indicate the activity of pulsing rings and backgrounds, while the black static in the middle shows the activity of text.

Composite Frames (Z-Projection)

These images were produced by adding or otherwise combining every frame of the recording into one image.

Volume Viewing

These images were produced by compiling the frames (1 per second) along a Z-axis to form a 3D solid.

Apparatus and Paratexts

Code etc.

Buttons group

• Start (2 buttons for this)
• System Requirements
• The SUBLIMINAL CON
• Colophon
• SUBLIMINALS VIA THE WWW
• CONCRETE POETRY & SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING
• APORIA
• FALLING INTO THE VOID
• [blank] --> an invisible buttons (#358 & 400)
• [below are buttons that are just made up of letters]
• REQUIREMENTS
• SUBLIMINAL CON
• VIA WWW
• COLOPHON
• CONCRETE POETRY
• APORIA
• THE VOID
• EXIT

One invisible button goes to the pignatari1.html page. it launches from the "Drink Coca Cola" text on Frame 61 --> the concrete poetry & sublim. advertising page. Actually the hotspot seems to stretch from the red text (which we might assume to be a hotlink) to "Drink Coca-Cola."

So the link to the subliminal ad is an "invisible" hotspot. We only find it when we mouse over it. The red font of "beba coca cola" signals to us "possible link here" but the link itself isn't just on the red text, it spills over.

Subliminal Word List (Alphabetized)