This is really worth watching, so 🎩 to Melinda Rackham for the share. Has there been any serious critical writing about this kind post-chaos aesthetic? It’s a way we’ve learned to see since the mid/late ’80s: Gleick’s book Chaos (’87) made it pop, but I remember learning about aspects of it a few years in earlier in Scientific American. Nowadays, this mix of particle-based rendering and a sort of meta-editing — where the visual frame remains the same (or lacks the context needed to tell whether the object or the ~camera is moving) but the temporal frame suddenly lurches from one speed to another — has become standard fare. What interests me here are the variations: disintegration into particles, networks, and other mathematicky structures. This stuff strikes me as a sort of messageless message, and almost (or maybe purely) ideological assertion: that the world is just endless morphology. Not this piece by Kurokawa per se, more this mode of rendering a vision of reality, a sort of spectacular nihilism. This form is technocratic, and in obvious ways it also builds on the aesthetic of mutability at the heart of psychedelic aesthetics — think of the lettering and layout of late-’60s San Fran concert posters. The revived interest in psychedelics, which the Bay Area has been driving once again fits right in, and in non-obvious ways — for example, the interest in psylocybin to compensate for a sort of widespread ‘computer-aided’ depression. One BIG problem with the aesthetic at work in this video (again, the general aesthetic, not this specific piece) is that math doesn’t offer a comprehensible human narrative: no beginning, no middle, no end. In this piece, the sound score tries to add that (too heavy-handed, imo), but it doesn’t really go anywhere, it just intensifies. Someone better at listening than I am could surely find much more, but to me it just sounds like an electro-industrial fugue. Anyway, if any of you know of some serious thinking about the rise of this aesthetic, pointers would be much appreciated.