s.03 Terminal Daemons
04.28.24
Concept
Daemons are attendant spirits that lay in our soul.
Daemons are computer programs that run as background processes.
Daemons are the inspiring force.
Daemons don’t interact with the end user, but are called on their behalf.
Daemons enact a series of tasks that are unseen to the user, retrieving data.
Daemons host web pages, perform tasks for apps the user uses, accessing files for the user.
Terminal Daemons plays with the daemons dormant in our computers, summoning them to the surface to
enact changes in the world around them.
My Focus
Terminal Daemons was a show about the silent scripts that run in the underbelly of our computers. Those scripts which we don’t see or interact with except as intermediaries to other things. We struggled to attach that idea to some kind of visual element, as the daemons inside your computer don’t have any interfaces.
We played around with a few ideas, settling on an ASCII daemon inspired by the moths of the genus Eudamonia, and an ASCII version of the moths itself. The word Eudamonia translates to good spirit, which felt fitting for the daemons that are helping run your computer. The ASCII moths were designed by our graphic designer, Tao.
For show visuals, I leaned into asset based art rather than my usual generative explorations. I had been working a lot on some eye and mouth networks in Touchdesigner which can be found in the experiments tab, and also played around a lot with different moth based visuals. I glitched and datamoshed videos of moths taking flight, controlled an fbx moth, and added some of my generative pieces from previous sets.
I also did an installation piece for Terminal Daemons. The installation was a projection seen through fabric. The projection was a glitched video of me searching through my computer for the daemon scripts and giving a background for the show using terminal and text edit.
Curation wise, this show only had one installation artist, being Tina Tarighian. I had seen her work previously and gave her free reign in terms of making something. She created a tool called Multimanifestion Supervitamin, which you can check out on her website here!
Documentation
0.2.1.3.4.5.7.6.
0. Installation by Tina Tarighian
2. Performance by Magali, A Cult accompanied by my visuals
4. Performance by Magali, A Cult accompanied by my visuals
6. Performance by MAKS
1. Performance by Layla Rose Greene & Innana Rose
3. Performance by AMYGDALA
5. Performance by AMYGDALA accompanied by my visuals
7. Eye projections done by me