Created by Andreas Gysin, the project is a micro site for the dark, powerful and loud sound 7” record release by the German artist Novoline. While designing the cover Andreas was asked to leave a tiny white area somewhere on the back-cover to write the edition number from one to one-hundred, by hand. Instead of putting just an empty square Andreas started thinking about 100 tiny dots to black-out with a pencil, or LCD like system to hand-color. Eventually this small aspect became the main idea for the cover which now hosts a big two-digits number.

The grid used to design the initial numbers became also the base for a whole character-set used in the animation. Two versions of the characters were created: an obvious-one, a bit squared, and a more diversified-one with letters of different heights. Andreas decided to use the squared one (less interesting in individual characters) because it worked better when used in the animation layout.

Andreas wanted the animation to use all the available space (window or screen) and be independent from the aspect-ratio. The animation is driven by a small JavaScript program and rendered on a html canvas; it consists of a grid of characters in motion. Each letter has a few attributes like colour, weight, position, rotation, etc. Some of those attributes get the values out of a small texture (a tiny off-screen canvas) which simplifies the animation and pattern creation process. To create the airport-display-like animations (Andreas’ personal weak spot, see for example) string are composed out of repeated character sequences which then build patterns and rhythms.

Sometimes I suspect that I spend more time to build the tools for a project than the project itself. I see them as alibis for my postponements.

Randomness is part of Novoline’s process of creating music, so it became part of the clip too: specific cue points release more and more features which are then randomised: character rotation jumps in only after the first minute, stroke weight, colours and other patterns come afterwards. A few hours were invested to build a small JavaScript cue point editor which permitted to adjust those timings on the fly. For more, see:

Micro Site | Project Page | Andreas Gysin

Novoline 7”, 2013 published by dasandereselbst.org