I Am Spinning In A Room

Riffing off Alvin Lucier’s classic I Am Sitting In A Room, I took a selfie, turned it into a disc and repeatedly asked ImageMagick to rotate it by 1 degree 10,000 times. Each rotation meant re-saving the file as a JPEG, a lossy format which throws away a small amount of data. Usually this is unnoticeable but by repeating the process 10,000 times the image quickly degrades. The soundtrack is the strip of pixels at 6 o’clock for each frame fed through the Virtual ANS synth.

This work builds on Spectral Selfies and the degradation was an accidental discovery while developing Live Sonification of Photography