Static Films

What if you wanted to hide a book from the flames—including the digital ones—of the censors? What if you converted it into a code, hiding the offending text in a secret language? And what if, knowing that all codes can be broken, you made the coded text appear to be something else entirely, so the code breakers wouldn’t even notice it?

Thus was born Static Films, a series of videos which appear to be some variant of white noise but which actually hold key texts from the Western canon.

The 4K video format is 3840 pixels wide by 2160 pixels high, 8,294,400 pixels in all. That’s a lot of data. The Bible goes by in three frames at thirty frames a second. Shakespeare—everything he wrote, flicks by as you blink. It looks like static but it is data, every pixel part of the code.

I made videos of a dozen important texts. For added fun I created the static in such a way as to reveal something about the underlying text. For example, with the works of Darwin the pixels (the encoded text) evolve according to John Conway’s classic Game of Life program. For Marx the demographics of communist rule are charted using population and national flags of declared communist countries from the October Revolution to the present day. The Shakespeare Static Films are coded by the colors mentioned in each play, weighted by the number of times each color occurs in that particular play. And so on.

I made two versions of each of the variations. One is the static playing endlessly in a loop. The other is a mini film where the static plays only once. There is an audio track on these.