Code Movie 1

Giselle Beiguelman, with music by Helga Stein

Many authors and artists working in electronic media are exploring the concept of codework, interrogating the nature of digital artifacts as products of multilayered transcription beneath the surface level of the computer screen. Without using any words, Beiguelman's Code Movie 1 treats the hexadecimal code of JPG images as a signifier in its own right.

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Author description: Code Movies are made with hex, ASCII, and binary codes extracted from JPG images. Saved as simple text, they are reworked and edited in Flash. They are part of a larger project I've been working on since 2004 (//**Code_UP). The submitted work (Code Movie 1) is made of hexa code. The project interrogates the role of the code in meaning construction and the new forms of translations that digital languages embody. It questions: Now that the Cybertext confuses itself with the notion of Place (a web address, for example) and that Image only reveals itself through a "hyperinscription" (a URL), can we think in a poetics of transcodification between media and file formats? Can we keep talking about "WYSIWYG" utopias? How does it affect our ways of reading, seeing, and perceiving?

Instructions: Code Movie 1 does not require any action from the user. To hear the sound, turn on the computer's speakers or plug in headphones. Do not resize Code Movie 1, as it affects the soundtrack.

Previous publication: Code Movie 1 was published by in 2004 on Beiguelman's site, http://www.desvirtual.com/, as part of the //**Code_UP project.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

This Flash work has been preserved with Ruffle by the Electronic Literature Lab in February 2021. When it launches, a play button may appear that you will need to click; after launching it, the work may take time to appear.