Origin of Life - retimed

Origin of Life - retimed

The Origin of Life
Commodore64 pattern generator.
Copyright (c) 1986 William A. Schaeffer

Special thanks to David New, Mark Stevens, Charles Darwin, COCO the Clown..

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In 1986, David New loaned me the TR-707 Drum machine to play the soundtrack. I composed the music on the sequencer in the drum machine.

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I wrote the graphics program on the Commodore 64 that drew boxes around randomly placed seed points. I spent a whole weekend recording various samples, and then spent a couple months editing the samples by hand on 3/4 inch U-Matic. There is a general theme of the evolution of multi celled organizms from the original spark of life, but mostly this video is just interesting, randomly generated, abstract geometries to look at.

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Some fanciful descriptions:

"Commodore64 Pattern Generation Taxonomy of results presented for your analysis."

"Rectilinear impression of Mitochondriacal effects in the 2-D rainbow world of enharmonic illusion."

"Mitosis leads Meiosis and plant forms yield colonies in the continual dance of life."

"Look at the pretty colors." - Anon.

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The audio and video were digitally restored from different original source tapes. When the video was re-edited, the timing of the two restored tracks was slightly off. At the time, I was reluctant to work on this piece any more and just left it "as is."

I have edited the video to synchronize with the audio and the timing is much better now.