GLORYBEE

"GLORYBEE" is an experimental executable created by Alan Sondheim using Microsoft Visual Basic (VBA). Like most of his experiments with VBA, this piece revolves around the use of glitch as commentary upon a central image. The program eventually becomes unresponsive by design. 

"The programs are operating in the space between analog and digital, although totally grounded in the digital. How much can mathesis transform semantics? All of them except for bee.exe are determined and therefore the metaphorical application of the machinic to the world. 

The code is simply vb-wise and somewhat complex in terms of nesting and recursion. I tend to work well with trignometric functions, which near the limits, say, of tangent and cotangent, can resonate with the limits of the computation itself. 

Furthermore these images are interpreted in terms of the underlying photographs - a lichen-like growth upon them, empathetic and cohering. In turn, they modify, deconstruct. 

What are they deconstructing? Language, meaning, symbols, the symbolic. Through erasure and the growth of form."

"glory, holy holy, a biological upthrust, smooth, wreathed like the green 
man. and then the black onyx, at the heart, the untouchable self, an 
expansion to obsidian, a scrying, a castration of phallus, ever increasing 
circles. at first a button and false hallejulah disrupts into a shouted 
obscured jehova. black turns to brown, button becomes plate, then bowl as 
depth of concentric circles fools the eye. it creeps like propaganda, 
becoming one thing and then another, until a maelstrom of your god and my 
god and their god is an endless vortex."

-- Alan Sondheim

1 COPY IN THE NEXT

The Alan Sondheim Collection

An unpublished copy.

Alan Sondheim gave the files for this work to Dene Grigar in October of 2021.

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