Cs-55

Rutger Hauer; tears in rain; Vangelis' soaring soundtrack; Ridley Scott's grim, dystopian vision of Philip K. Dick's novel. I grew up with this, at a time when a movie making it onto television was a big thing. Over the years, I returned to the book and the film, craving subsequent movie cuts, working through K.W. Jeter's continuation of the tale, listening to Vangelis' extended soundtrack on a frequently-skipping early portable CD-player. And through those years, I've always wondered about the things that people wouldn't believe: the c-beams, glittering in the dark; the Tannhaüser Gate; and the attack ships, burning in space, just off the shoulder of Orion.

A canvas is split into regions, defined by a point and an angle. Across this canvas, random points are chosen, assigned values according to the number of regions in which they reside. Messy, splattered points are thrust into the void, forming a chaotic starfield of colourful beauty. And there, overlaid in scratchy, blur-smeared tracks, are the c-beams: atoms of Caesium-55 accelerated to near-light speeds, or so I'm told.

Monochrome variations exist, as do bright, colour-filled starfields. Lens flare and dark, polygon-based overlays mar infringe upon the background, casting shadow onto colour. Beam tightness and angle are variable; sometimes clustered into parallel streaks of light, sometimes a jumble of directionless light.

With thanks to Javier Graciá Carpio, whose works inspire and educate, and who revealed the secret of counting how many regions a point inhabits, albeit in a more confident and succinct manner than my own reinterpretation.

The render process is animated, but the piece is finished after precisely three hundred and sixty frames. Press [i] for just a little more information, and a few options for full-screen mode.