Zen Bars

I spent many hours programming Commodore64 pattern generation routines in the 1980's

This program is called Zen Bars and was inspired by the illustration on page 219 of the book "Art of the Twentieth Century" by Albert Schug, Harry N. Abrams, New York. The photo is of the front facade of the "Relief on the City Theater of Gelsenkirchen" The relief was made of horizontal bars of steel in a seemingly random arrangement. The architect was Werner Ruhnau.

When I saw the photo, I knew I could write a program to generate collections of a random number of random length horizontal bars. This is the result. I worked for 2, or 3 years on this program and the idea spawned the similar programs "Digital Trees" and "Bead Curtin" (part of the video "The Glass Bead Game").

I miss programming in BASIC, but the C64 seems painfully slow, and primitive, today. I still remember sitting in my livingroom watching simple programs like this on my TV set and feeling very futuristic. Of course, that was before the internet,windows 3.1,the cell phone, digital HD and youtube -- EVERYTHING seemed a lot more BASIC.

The placement, color, and length of the bars is dictated by random number probabilities. The time length of the display loop is a constant unit of time.

I love to run this program on the C64 and just watch the different designs, all unique. The calming and restful nature of the piece inspired the name "Zen Bars." The timing is the natural speed of the Commodore 64 processor refreshing one screen character at a time. Beauty.

I sent a copy of the program to Commodore64 magazine, but they declined to publish it.

The song was composed on the Korg 01-w and is called "Intermission Music, too" from the CD "Music for Daydreams" by Bill Schaeffer, available at www.cdbaby.com

video copyright (c) 1988, 2008, 2010, 2011 William A. Schaeffer