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I got this book from the garage of my step-mother's house on Ilex Circle in Palm Beach Gardens (circa 1983-5). I have no idea who it originally belonged to or where it came from. I carried the book around for years before doing anything with it and then in 1995, the last time I returned to school (when I finally finished) I did a project that used the above image. The image was a page or two inside front cover.

Basically I scanned the image and then converted it into vector art using a "tracing" program that came with CorelDraw. It made this incredibly complex object. I'm actually amazed that my old computer (my first computer) a Gateway pc (with the intel 486 processor) could handle such a complex vector file -- but it could. Was CorelDraw that good? Anyway, I turned the vector soup from the conversion into a bunch of discrete objects I could move around. I constructed the final animation out of this material. It was made one frame at a time in CorelDraw. I would move everything I wanted to move (figuring 15 frames per second) and click "Save As." I did this over and over again. I worked in the dark, mostly in my underwear, for a few days generating all the frames. I did little else while I was working on it. Move everything slightly, "Save As."

My original idea was a little bit different than the animation below. I had planned to create a poster-size printout for each frame and then find some public location to display the printout, one at a time, in succession. I figured it would take a year to "perform" the animation in this way. It would have been an animation with a frame rate of one frame per day (video is typically 30 frames per second and film is typically 24 frames per second). What I was interested in was the idea of the poster subtly changing every day. Would anyone notice these gradual, subtle changes?

I would have then documented this, every day (for the duration), and then turned these photos into another animation.

The final version, the animation below, was exhibited only once, in Los Angeles, 1997. I can never remember whether I made it in 1995 or 1996.