Great Again

You’re not really looking at the artwork here, just the output of a computer program. Each time you run the program it is different but since there is no easy way to display the running program here I just made videos.

Each of the videos in the project focuses on of eight key words—Corruption, impeachment, misdemeanors, etc. The program put a series of letters on the screen and then check to see if it has hit upon that particular word. The odds of getting any particular letter right is one in fifty-two (twenty-six uppercase and twenty-six lowercase). The odds of getting an entire word like “Impeachment” correct? One in 7,516,865,509,350,965,000, if I’ve done the math right.

The odds aren’t as bad as they sound. The program runs at fifteen tries per second. Nine hundred tries per minute, fifty-four thousand tries per hour, almost one point three million per day, nine million tries per week. Just keep waiting and you’ll eventually get “Impeachment.”

Lots of variations. The first ones start off with the colors (the exact colors, I measured them) from Trump campaign signs. (The font is borrowed from the signs, too.) Later versions make use of Perlin Noise—the algorithm usually behind the CGI surfaces you see in games—which allows the colors to drift in a random sort of way yet seem connected to the color just before and the color just after.