29 Oct Descend, Ascend

“Descend, Ascend” is a text-based animation written with Allison Parrish’s Javascript Bundle for writing ANSI terminal code in the browser. Here is her tutorial: The ANSI Terminal.

Check out the animation here, and the source code here.

Inspired by BP Nichol’s “First Screening”, “Descend, Ascend” shows two independent tracks of movements, the word “descend” (and the corresponding Chinese character 落) going from top to bottom, and the word “ascend”（andthe corresponding Chinese character 起) from bottom to top, the two tracks run parallel and intersect with each other every now and then. To break the rule of these orderly movements is a random scattering of empty spaces, letters that spell out the word “empty”, and the Chinese character 空 (which means “emptiness”).1