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Samia Halaby

DARK WEAVER

1989
Kinetic painting programmed on an amiga computer
00:38 min
Edition 2 of 5

The Amiga kinetic paintings are programs that Samia Halaby coded between 1986 and 1989 using the programming languages Basic and C on a Commodore Amiga 1000. 

In DARK WEAVER, a set of rectangular bars repeat by moving back and forth incrementally, each defining a specific area. Areas already defined by a moving bar are invaded by the motion of other bars. As vertical and horizontal bars intersect, diagonal boundaries are created between them. Differently incremented bars overlap, leaving a remnant of what they covered in the negative spaces between. 

This was a period when Halaby had begun programming in the C language and was creating functions that she called Yoyos. These functions received three values and produced the result: a number that increased until it reached the upper limit, decreased until it reached the lowest limit, and was incremented by the requested quantity. Yoyo functions are thus culled repeatedly to determine the location and incrementation of each bar. This is how they are made to go back and forth or up and down. Several sets of bars are called simultaneously, and as they move back and forth, they intersect.

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