"rust" 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. Sondheim describes "rust" as "slat, stattern, rhomboid, rhumatoid arthritic cells."
"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."
-- Alan Sondheim
Experiencing the Work
The work is an executable file that can be played once downloaded. Clicking once begins the work, prompting it to produce a gradual glitching effect across an image of rust. If the visitor clicks a second time, the work will crash itself and the executable will have to be relaunched in order to restart the experience.
1 COPY IN THE NEXT
An unpublished copy.
Alan Sondheim gave the files for this work to Dene Grigar in October of 2021.
COPY MEDIA FORMAT
File(s)