Support my work on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/melodysheep | Get the soundtrack: https://bit.ly/2HKl9fi | How's it all gonna end? This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be.

We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name a few.

This is a picture of the future as painted by modern science - a picture that will surely evolve over time as we dig for more clues to how our story will unfold. Much of the science is very recent - and new puzzle pieces are still waiting to be found.

To me, this overhead view of time gives a profound perspective - that we are living inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the perfect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a universe in its glory days, before it all fades away. Although the end will eventually come, we have a practical infinity of time to play with if we play our cards right. The future may look bleak, but we have enormous potential as a species.

Featuring the voices of David Attenborough, Craig Childs, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michelle Thaller, Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Mike Rowe, Phil Plait, Janna Levin, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, Alex Filippenko, and Martin Rees.

Big thanks to Protocol Labs for their support of this creation: https://protocol.ai/

And to my Patreon supporters: Juan Benet, Kalexan, Laine Boswell, Holly, Dave & Debbie Boswell, Abraxas, Alina Sigaeva, Aksel Tjønn, Daniel Saltzman, Crystal, Eico Neumann, geekiskhan, Giulia Carrozzino, Hannah Murphy, Jeremy Kerwin, JousterL, Lars Støttrup Nielsen, Leonard van Vliet, Mitchel Mattera, Nathan Paskett, Patrick Cullen, Randall Bollig, Roman Shishkin, Silas Rech, Stefan Stettner, The Cleaner, Timothy E Plum, Virtual_271, Westin Johnson, Yannic, and Anna & Tyson.

Soundtrack now available: https://bit.ly/2HKl9fi and coming soon to iTunes/Spotify/Etc

Additional visual material sourced from:

NASA Goddard Google SpaceX 2012 Geostorm Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking BMW X1 Journey to the Edge of the Universe Noah How the Universe Works Deep Impact Wonders of the Universe Moon raker vfx reel

Peace and love,

melodysheep @musicalscience melodysheep.com

Reclaiming the Nerdiverse [NSFW audio] is a fascinating hour-long discussion about women in science fiction and fantasy on the late night edition of the venerable BBC radio show Woman's Hour (podcast link). The host is Lauren Laverne, and her guests are author and game designer Naomi Alderman, journalist Helen Lewis, sociologist Linda Woodhead, fantasy novelist Zen Cho, and cosplayer and writer Lucy Saxon. The discussion takes in everything from 70s feminist writers to alpha/beta/omega slash fiction to cosplay etiquette to geek sexism. The Late Night Woman's Hour has been the topic of some discussion in Britain.

ADAM MAGYAR IS A computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim.

Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change, and where did it originally come from?

It all started with "cybernetics," an obscure term popularized by a mathematician named Norbert Weiner in the 1940s. For his groundbreaking book Cybernetics, Weiner borrowed the ancient Greek word "cyber," which is related to the idea of government or governing. Indeed, the only time the word cybernetics had appeared before was in a few works of political theory about the science of governance.

In his writing, Weiner described what was at the time a pretty futuristic idea — that one day there would be a computer system that ran on feedback. Essentially, it would be a self-governing system. And for a long time, cybernetics remained the purview of information theorists like Weiner, and early computer programmers.

Science fiction author Pat Cadigan, whose novel Mindplayers is a cyberpunk classic, recalled that her first encounter with "cyber" was of a decidedly Weinerish variety. She told io9 that the first time she heard the term was when she was in high school in 1967, and somebody mentioned cybernetics. "I asked what cybernetics was. 'It has to do with computers,' was the answer. My eyes glazed over. For years, that was the only word I knew with the prefix 'cyber' in it."

Mindplayers Amazon.com: $3.50 Buy now M34 readers bought this

But all that changed a little over a decade later. Cadigan recalled:

One morning in 1979, I was getting ready for work and Gary Numan's "Cars" came on the radio. Afterwards, the DJ said, "There's some cyberpunk for you." He was making a joke; in 1979, the punk movement was in full flower but the chaotic noise of punk music was starting to evolve into electronic noise. The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 4 SEXPAND Still, that joke quickly became a reality. In the early 1980s, the cyberpunk movement took over science fiction, spurred by the popularity of the film Bladerunner and William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. Authors like Cadigan, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker were writing mind-blowing stories about the merging of humans and computers. Cyber became a catch-all prefix that could be added to any word to make it sound cutting-edge. Cadigan noted that cyber "sort of supplanted the term 'digital' in some ways as an indicator of something that was high tech."

The 1990s: Decade of Cyber

RELATED

Are you a cyberpunk? This early 1990s poster explains it all to you. R.U. Sirius was a founder of Mondo 2000, the definitive futurist magazine of the early 1990s. And now he's posted a ton of snippets from it over … Read… Cyberpunk was a mostly-underground artistic style in the 1980s, but suddenly in the 1990s everything was cyber. As more and more people got internet access, the alien world of cyberspace from William Gibson's work became a household consumer item.

Richard Holden, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, recently researched the history of cyber for the dictionary. He told io9 that the 1990s were a time when use of the word underwent rapid diversification:

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for the prefix cyber­- has evidence of its use going back to 1961 (in Cybertron, as it happens), but . . . it seems to have become particularly popular in the 1990s — we don’t have all that much evidence for its use before then. This seems likely to be a result of the invention of the World Wide Web, and the earliest evidence we’ve found for words like cyber-bully, cybercommunity, cybergeek, cyberlaw, cyberstalker, and, indeed, cybersex and cyberwar all comes from the early 90s. At that time you . . . seem to get a mix of positive and negative terms involving the prefix, which possibly reflects the mixed feelings people often have about the opportunities and threats a new technology can bring. Ben Zimmer, who writes about linguistics for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Holden, noting that the seemingly-incongruous ideas of cybersex and cyberwar "grew up side by side." The earliest recorded use of the term "cybersecurity" came in 1989, the exact same year when the word "cyberporn" was coined. But neither term was dominant. In the heady days of the 1990s "information superhighway," before people got used to the idea that shopping, dating, and work could exist online, adding the prefix cyber to something made it seem like it was taking place in the gleaming, pixelated world inhabited by futuristic youth.

Had the iPhone come along in the 1990s, it's likely that we'd be calling our devices something very different. Cadigan said, "Terminology-wise, I find it interesting that we never had cyber-phones. The mobile/celluar phone became the cell and then evolved into the smart phone, not the cyber-phone." Just as today everything from buildings to phones can be "smart," in the 1990s anything could be cyber.

Including sex.

The Cybersex Moment

The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 56 SEXPAND Back in the days of AOL chat rooms, IRC channels, and text-only multi-user games, lots of people started having cybersex. Most of this furtive online activity involved no more than people talking dirty via text.

But cyber-pundits suggested that teledildonics and virtual reality sex were just around the corner. Soon, we would be having sex with chrome-plated dragon beasts in landscapes made of diamond flowers. And we would be stimulating our lovers 3,000 miles away with sex toys that plugged into both partners, sending the orgasmic shivers of one to the other via the internet.

Zimmer pointed out that Douglas Adams may have invented the idea of cybersex back in 1982, when he remarked in Life, the Universe and Everything that "Zaphod had spent most of his early history lessons plotting how he was going to have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him." As more college age people began piling on to the internet in the mid-1990s, cybersex became trendy slang for what you did with your long-distance boyfriend using the university dial-up connection. And, like most slang, it quickly got shortened to cyber.

Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written. Hard copy sticks around, equally a delight to scholars and a burden to office managers. More significantly, the read-out system - the human eye, hand, and brain for which the scribes of Sumer scratched in clay - has not changed appreciably, which is why nearly every written thing that survives, from the dawn of writing to yesterday's newspaper, is still accessible and constitutes a fragment of civilization. But as we move forward we discover that not all modern means of storing data share the characteristic of eternal readability. This problem originally appeared in the pre-electronic age, with the invention of sound recording. Signals were embodied in an object that required a specific machine to render it back into a form that could be apprehended by the senses. In those days, there were dozens of incompatible recording formats. The 10-inch, 78-rpm shellac platter ultimately won out, but not before the losers had produced a substantial body of recorded material, some of it irreplaceable. Serious audiophiles constructed customized machines that could play anything from Edison cylinders to the various platter formats - including those that ran from the axis to the circumference - to the standard outside-in disk. When LPs were introduced, turntable manufacturers included variable-speed switches, so you could play your old 45s as well as the new "albums." That was a slower era, of course, when decades passed between one standard and another. But the advent of digital computing in the early '50s vastly accelerated the pace at which we replace formats designed to store information. With computers increasing an order of magnitude in speed every two or three years, at the same time decreasing in cost, the pressure to dump the old, less efficient standards was irresistible. Obviously, much of the data stored on the old systems - the material of immediate or archival value to the organization doing the replacement - is recorded in the new format and lives on. But a lot of it doesn't. Digital archaeology is a discipline that doesn't quite exist yet, but may develop to deal with this problem, which is pervasive in the world of data. NASA, for example, has huge quantities of information sent back from space missions in the 1960s stored on deteriorating magnetic tape, in formats designed for computers that were obsolete twenty years ago. NASA didn't have the funds to transfer the data before the machines became junk. The National Center for Atmospheric research has "thousands of terabits" of data on aging media that will probably never be updated because it would take a century to do it. The archival tapes of Doug Engelbart's Augment project - an important part of the history of computing - are decaying in a St. Louis warehouse. "The 'aging of the archives' issue isn't trivial," says desktop publisher Ari Davidow. "We're thinking of CD-ROM as a semi-permanent medium, but it isn't. We already have PageMaker files that are useless." Also, recall that the PC era is an eye-blink compared to the mainframe generations that came and went under the care of the old Egyptian priesthood of computer geeks. (Would you believe a '60s vintage GE 225 machine that ran tapes that stored 256 bits per inch? Drop some developer on it and you can actually see the bits.) J. Paul Holbrook, technical services manager for CICNet (one such Egyptian priest), summarizes the problem this way: "The biggest challenge posed by systems like this is the sheer volume of information saved - there's too much stuff, it isn't indexed when it's saved, so there's lots of stuff you could never discover without loading it up again - that is, if you could load it up. "The nature of the technology makes saving it all a daunting task. It's certainly possible to keep information moving forward indefinitely, if you keep upgrading it as you go along. But given the volume of data and how fast it's growing, this could present an enormous challenge." Holbrook says twenty years is the maximum time you can expect to maintain a form of digital data without converting it to a newer format. He draws an analogy to print: "What if all your books had only a twenty-year life span before you had to make copies of them?" A 'museum of information,' suggested by WELL info-maven Hank Roberts, might help to stem the leakage. Roberts says, "[Museum] collections are spotty and odd sometimes, because whenever people went out to look for anything, they brought back 'everything else interesting.' And that's the only way to do it, because it always costs too much to get info on demand - a library makes everything available and throws out old stuff; a museum has lots of stuff tucked away as a gift to the future."

I want to read about Augmented Reality. Tech developments IRL; techno-utopian / transhuman dreams, and hard-fought aspirations; and any sci-fictional dystopian nightmares you know of. Articles and academic papers especially welcome, but what sci-fi stories have dealt imaginatively with Augmented Reality? Where's it going? And who is worried?

Google Glass seems to offer us the best Augmented Reality possibilities at the moment, but it all feels a bit geeky and mundane. Who is really thinking outside the box?

Note: I'm not as interested in Virtual Reality here - an old paradigm which was written about extensively in the 90s. Thanks

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010. Besides sheer quantity, viruses, which were originally used as academic proof of concepts, quickly turned into geek pranks, then evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, the virus scene had been monetized, and virtually all viruses were developed with the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models.

 In the following story, FortiGuard Labs looks at the most significant computer viruses over the last 40 years and explains their historical significance. 

Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through a sociological point of view, adopting a dialectical perspective in the analysis of network dynamics might open an opportunity to question the notion of artistic intervention itself. This thread connects multiple identities projects and hacker practices of the last decade with business strategies of today, reflecting on the role of activists and artists in social media. Their interventions are thought as a challenge to generate a critical understanding of contemporary informational power (or info-capitalism), and to imagine possible routes of political and artistic action. Furthermore, this analysis questions the methodology of radical clashes of opposite forces to generate socio-political transformation, proposing more flexible viral actions as relevant responses to the ubiquity of capitalism.

In my last 3quarksdaily article I considered the ability of science-fiction – and the impossible objects it contains – to highlight the gap between us and ‘The Thing Itself’ (the fundamental reality underlying all phenomena). In this follow-up I ask whether the way these fictional ‘Things’ determine their continued existence – by copying, cloning or imitation – can teach us about our conception of nature.

Seth Brundle: What's there to take? The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore... I know what the disease wants.

Ronnie: What does the disease want?

Seth Brundle: It wants to... turn me into something else. That's not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.

Ronnie: Turned into what?

Seth Brundle: Whaddaya think? A fly. Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming... Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?

The Fly, 1986

In David Cronenberg’s movie The Fly (1986) we watch through slotted fingers as the body of Seth Brundle is horrifically transformed. Piece by piece Seth becomes Brundlefly: a genetic monster, fused together in a teleportation experiment gone awry. In one tele-pod steps Seth, accompanied by an unwelcome house-fly; from the other pod emerges a single Thing born of their two genetic identities. The computer algorithm designed to deconstruct and reconstruct biology as pure matter cannot distinguish between one entity and another. The parable, as Cronenberg draws it, is simple: if all the world is code then ‘all the world’ is all there is.

Science fiction is full of liminal beings. Creatures caught in the phase between animal and human, between alien and Earthly, between the material and the spirit. Flowing directly from the patterns of myth Brundlefly is a modern day Minotaur: a manifestation of our deep yearning to coalesce with natural forces we can’t understand. The searing passions of the bull, its towering stature, are fused in the figure of the Minotaur with those of man. The resultant creature is too fearsome for this world, too Earthly to exist in the other, and so is forced to wander through a labyrinth hovering impossibly between the two. Perhaps Brundlefly’s labyrinth is the computer algorithm winding its path through his genetic code. As a liminal being, Brundlefly is capable of understanding both worlds from a sacred position, between realities. His goal is reached, but at a cost too great for an Earthly being to understand. Seth the scientist sacrifices himself and there is no Ariadne’s thread to lead him back.

In her book on monsters, aliens and Others Elaine L. Graham reminds us of the thresholds these ‘Things’ linger on:

“[H]uman imagination, by giving birth to fantastic, monstrous and alien figures, has… always eschewed the fiction of fixed species. Hybrids and monsters are the vehicles through which it is possible to understand the fabricated character of all things, by virtue of the boundaries they cross and the limits they unsettle.”

Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human

Hybrids such as the Minotaur or Brundlefly are meeting points for disparate categories of representation. They symbolise the tragic limits of human perception. Unable to grasp the world in and of Itself (nature) we colonise it with ever more fabricated representations and imitations (culture) which only result in distancing us yet further from The Thing Itself. One such category of fabrication, a favourite in science fiction, is ‘code’. Brundlefly is a Thing caught on the threshold between, what in geek-terminology we might call, wetware and software. Cronenberg’s parable plays into the hands of every techno-fearing luddite: a monster born from our desire to reduce nature to science; to simplify lumpy, oozing, unpredictable flesh in the patterns of an efficient genetic code.

We are all the tragic Brundefly because whilst we see beauty and endless creative potential in the natural world around us, we find it impossible to quantify those same categories in the reductive models we have devised to describe them. To describe nature, whether genetic codes unwinding or bees busying around their nest, we gasp at its “creativity”, ascribing its endless variation a human-like attention to detail. But as Richard Dawkins alludes to below, the most creative force in nature is the absolute opposite of perfection: it is in fact error. The world that science has modelled for us is a world riddled with mistakes, failures and run away coding errors. In order to ‘create’ nature must, as Alexander Pope said of the human, err:

“Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.”

Richard Dawkins, Viruses of the Mind

It is beneficial for life that errors exist and are propagated by biological systems. Too many copying errors and all biological processes would be cancerous, mutating towards oblivion. Too much error management (redundancy) and biological change, and thus evolution, could never occur.

Simply put, exchange within and between natural systems has no value unless change, and thus error, is possible within the system. What science fiction allows us to do is peek into a world where nature’s love for error is switched off, or allowed to run rampant. What would be the consequence of a truly ‘perfect’ natural process, devoid of error? In John Carpenter’s The Thing we see the result of such a process: a nature perfect by our standards, but terrible in its consequences.

Blair: You see, what we're talking about here, is an organism that imitates other life forms, and it imitates them perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs, it tried to digest them, absorb them, and in the process shape its own cells to imitate them. This, for instance...That's not dog, it's imitation. We got to it before it had time to finish.

Norris: Finish what?

Blair: Finish imitating these dogs.

The Thing, 1982

John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is a claustrophobic sci-fi masterpiece, containing all the hallmarks of a great horror film. As in The Fly, the film depicts a sinister turn for the body, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits the awesome ability to imitate its host, devouring any creature (or human) it comes across before giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of blood and protoplasm. The Thing copies cell by cell and its process is so perfect - at every level of replication - that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts and even thinks like the original. The Thing is so relentless, its copies so perfect, that the outpost's Doctor is sent mad at the implications:

Blair: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the earth... and it's not gonna stop!!!

In The Thing it is we, the human race, who are trapped between realities. A twist in the truth that highlights our own liminal nature. If, as Dawkins suggests, evolution is about the imperfect copy, then, like the tragic Brundlefly, or the towering figure of the Minotaur, the characters in The Thing are torn between two equally horrifying worlds. In one, the alien Thing aims for perfection, cloning its hosts cell by cell until, like The Ship of Argo, an entirely new, but identical world remains. In the other, the beauty of nature, in all its intricacy, is the result of a billion years of ugly mutation. 

Which process is closest to the truth? Which result is more hideous? I have not the authority to say. In science fiction every improbable event is balanced by the existence of an equally improbable reality. The Thing Itself, the world beneath phenomenon, and the Things that inhabit it, have always been impossible to comprehend. Where science fiction takes us, kicking and screaming, is right back to the real world, our knuckles a little whiter from the journey.

by Daniel Rourke

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:

• 'The Thing Itself' : A Sci-fi Archaeology
• Ranciere's Ignoramus
• A Diatribe from the Remains of Dr. Fred McCabe
• Inside Code: A Conversation...
• Communicating the Body \ Interpreting the Code
• Speaking About Ants, Superman and Centaurs

by Daniel Rourke "The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world... It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tal. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world." Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image Take 12 images and splice them end to end: a shaded length of acetate through which a bright white light is to be shone. This makes one second of film. The reel spools onwards, as the seconds tick by, and from these independent images (isolations of time separated in space) an illusion of coherence emerges.During a recent flurry of internet activity I stumbled across the work of Takeshi Murata. His videos, having made their way, legitimately or otherwise, into the mysterious Realm of YouTube, have achieved something of a cult status. Among various digital editing techniques Murata is one of the most famous purveyors of the 'Datamoshed' video. A sub-genre of 'glitch-art', datamoshing at first appears to be a mode of expression fine-tuned for the computer geek: a harmless bit of technical fun with no artistic future. But as I watched Murata's videos, from Monster Movie (2005), through to Untitled (Pink Dot) (2007) I became more and more convinced that datamoshing has something profound to say about the status of the image in modern society. Furthermore, and at the risk of sounding Utopian, datamoshing might just be to film what photography was to painting. Take a human subject. Any will do. Have them sit several metres from your projection, making sure to note that their visual apparatus is pointing towards, and not away from, the resulting cacophony of images. There is no need to alert the subject to your film. Humans, like most animals, have a highly adapted awareness of movement. Your illusion cannot help but catch their attention. As soon as the reel begins to roll they will be hooked. Cinema is all pervasive. Not just because we all watch (and love) movies, nor that the narratives emerging from cinema directly structure our modern mythos. Rather it is through the language of cinema, whether we are sat in front of a screen or not, that much of the past hundred years of cultural change, of technological and political upheaval can be understood. For Walter Benjamin, whose writings on media appeared almost as regularly as the images flashed by a movie projector, the technology of film fed into and organised the perceptual apparatus of the modern era. Soon the subject will tire of your film. This has nothing to do with their attention span, nor is it an indication that your film itself is dull. Rather, in a very short time the human subject will grow so accustomed to the cacophony of images that they will begin to consider it as a natural component of their world. The solution is simple. Over the coming decades, as new technologies emerge, incorporate them into your film. For instance, sound has long been important to humans. Why not use some? And while you are at it, throw in some colour, expand the size of your images, begin projecting 24 images a second rather than 12... But I am getting ahead of myself. First you will need a good story, or better still, a political aspiration you wish to impose upon your solitary viewer. Don't hesitate to let your imagination fly. It's amazing what can be expressed with 24 images a second. Benjamin was talking about mass production, about technological reproducibility and the impact that it was having on our notion of identity. What did it mean to be subsumed by material objects, each identical in kind to the last? The role of cinema in grasping this change was, for Benjamin, crucial. Like the illusion which emerges from 24 images projected each second the fragmentation of modern society only increased as the cohesion it promoted intensified. As the objects around us lose their uniqueness, being merely replicas of one another, so the human subject mistakes the closeness of perception for the authenticity of the object. Film was, and perhaps still is, a kind of expulsion from the present experience. In cinema reality becomes multiplied, an experience that seems to mirror the sublimation of perception under the contiguous clarity of the cinematic image. Once a film ends this mode of seeing carries onward into the world, pushing the present deeper and deeper beneath the apparatus of society. For Benjamin film, and more directly cinema, was the looking glass of our times. And as our times grew ever more complex in their appearance, so it was film which would stand as our totem: "Seriousness and play, rigor and license, are mingled in every work of art, though in very different proportions... The primary social function of art today is to rehearse the interplay [between nature and humanity]. This applies especially to film. The function of film is to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily." Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility Consider the frame of your film as a frame upon a world. Within its boundaries your human subject will experience depths of motion, of emotion, that explode their centered selves. Before long your subject will begin to mistake movement of the frame for movement within the frame, for is it not the case that as the movie camera follows its actors it isolates them within the repeated image? Watch as the horse gallops, each flick of the hooves moving it onwards in space and time. The horse gallops in relation to the moving frame: an isolated image of change for the single viewer to behold. Note how your human subject mistakes time for space, and space for time. Note how, before long, the horse's gallop elicits a knowing yawn beneath the viewer's lingering gaze. Perception has exploded, and the world will never be the same again. In cinema the image became multiplied, expanded and distributed. Through the machine of the projector images spooled, one after another; through the machine of Hollywood film was expressed, dispersed and made contiguos with the substance of society. It appears that now, in the age of the digital, video has replaced film as our noun of choice, and like the omnipresent images of the filmic event, it is now video itself which has become multiple. YouTube is to video what cinema was to the image. Instead of directors and editors, we now have video mix-ups and internet memes. Instead of montage we have 'channels', instead of Grand Opening Nights and Red Carpets we have 'Share this on Facebook' buttons and vast comments sections filled with debate, debase and debunk. In short Youtube, and distributive systems like it, have become the new frame within which the images of video, and their illusionary after-effects, are isolated and re-expressed, in endless repetition: "The cinematographic image is always dividual. This is because, in the final analysis, the screen, as the frame of frames, gives common standard of measurement to things which do not have one - long shots of countryside and close-ups of the face, an astronomical system and a single drop of water - parts which do not have the same denominator of distance, relief or light. In all these senses the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the image."Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image By now your human subject should not only understand the language of film, they should live it. Over 100 years have passed since you began your experiment, and in that time film, by becoming cinema, has grown to such proportions that no aspect of human perception may escape from it. Like a stone-age baby brought up to be a chattering homo-sapien, your subject will, by now, be a walking, talking embodiment of the cinematic. You may fear this coming of age, and quite rightly, for rather than admiring from afar the power of the camera, of the edit and the montage, your subject will believe that their world was always this contiguous. The copy has been copied, beyond its means to produce unique moulds. Cinema has begun to simulate itself. The last image rolls now, the last flicker of light colours the retina. Today the great experiment ended. Digital distribution systems like YouTube are only possible because of a series of clever algorithms which compress the information contained within each video. Data compression, in a nutshell, turns 24 separate images a second into the minimal of information required to create a close approximation of those same frames sliding into each other. Why place every frame of a video online if within each frame, and shared amongst them, there exist aspects of the image which remain the same across contiguous moments? Compression is like the reduction of video into its component DNA. By reducing a video to the DNA required to compose each image half of the job of compression is done. The second, and perhaps, cleverer part of video compression is the addition of another segment of 'DNA' which tells video software how the movement between each image should be expressed. Datamoshing plays with these elements. It breaks the notion of separation between image and movement, indeed, it creates a new merging reference between the two. In the datamoshed video image and movement are blended, even interchanged for one another. Each unique image in the datamoshed video becomes a token of movement within a frame that extends far beyond the isolated moment. This text will be replaced In a datamoshed video an image from frame one of the video can leak, corrupt and interface with an image in frame 100. What's more, the movement DNA exchanged between contiguous frames can be made to jump ahead, or simply blend with a previous image. A digital video becomes to the datamosher a paint pallet of delicious colour and, in motion, one video may merge with another - the two forging a brand new step in an organic datamosh dance.As cinematographic subjects we have an integral understanding of the language of film. Although we know that the frames of cinema are separate, are mere instant images in an infinite whole, we crave the illusion of movement they create. Takeshi Murata's short film, Untitled (Pink Dot), corrupts the separation of image and movement. In an early frame we briefly notice Sylvester Stallone fire his gun, but as the resulting explosion rips across the frame his image is transposed into the fire, leaving a remnant of his figure to merge with the resulting miasma. Throughout this interplay, a pulsing pink dot draws our attention at the centre of the frame (also appearing to be connected with the pulsing noise transposed over the video). This dot, surely a symbol of our viewing, perceiving centre, is blended, in organic symbiosis with the datamoshed miasma. It is as if we, our viewing centres enraptured by the filmic event, have been consumed by its flow. Our cinematic instinct still perceives the figure of Rambo, of the flash of the machine-gun pulse, but as the explosive fire tears through the pink dot it is as if the perceiving mind has been melted through too. What would have Walter Benjamin and Giles Deleuze thought of datamoshing? of YouTube videos displayed on iPhones? of High Definition data files corrupted by pink dots and compression artefacts? These new technologies and modes of distribution play into our instincts in much the same way that film did 100 years ago. It occurs to me that reality has always been formed in feedback with our technologies, that as our art and culture express time and space in ever greater multiples so our minds are forced to complexify to catch up. The feedback which follows, through artistic expression and cultural contemplation, drags the human subject through their world at ever greater speeds. Cinema evolved alongside the most expansive century that mankind has ever seen. It allowed us, along with various other technologies, to isolate the complex present in ways inconceivable before. I don't wish to offer any branching philosophy here, nor talk at length on the perceptual or cultural importance of 'compression artefacts'. Instead I ask you to gather up your perceptive apparatus, and let it sift slowly through the various videos distributed throughout (and below) this article. There is something about the datamoshed video, in the way it takes advantage of the viewer's cinematic instinct, that fascinates me. And when I look up from the datamoshed video, blinking hard to make reality fall back into focus, the world makes a little more sense to my viewing, perceiving centre. To me reality feels more datamoshed every time I look up. To me the real world now looks like it might just have been datamoshed all along. by Daniel Rourke Videos featured in this article: • Silver by Takeshi Murata • Monster Movie by Takeshi Murata • Venetian Snares, Szamar Madar by David O'Reilly • A backwards version of Chairlift, Evident Utensil, by Ray Tintori, encoded backwards by YouTube user PronoiacOrg • MishMosh, by YouTube user datamosher • Untitled (Pink Dot) by Takeshi Murata