VIS 40 Project 2: 1-Pixel Video
This visual arts project tested both my skill and my patience. The assignment was to create a one-pixel video (recommended to simulate one pixel by blowing it up) and to take that limitation and still create a unique project. The focus of my project was to show two things: creativity can be found in the most unlikely of places, and limitations are what inspire such creativity.
The knee-jerk reaction to the project guidelines is to whip open Photoshop or Paint, create single-color frames, and paste these frames and some audio into Windows Movie Maker or iMovie to create a video. However, I decided to work beyond the traditional medium (when did the computer become the traditional medium?) and return to the roots of new media art: by coding my project. I decided to write code for something so unique that competition would be very hard to find:
My graphing calculator.
My calculator is a TI-84+ Silver Edition, running a 15 MHz ZiLOG Z80 processor and sporting 28k of usable RAM (128k altogether, plus 1.5MB Flash ROM). Armed with an intermediate understanding of z80 assembly but very little experience with actual code, I brainstormed for ideas: with the medium chosen, what do I code?
I decided on reading data from RAM one byte at a time, starting at the program's start location, $9D93. With each byte, I mask out each bit separately, and I either fill the screen or clear the screen if the bit is set or not set, respectively. I also send power to or remove power from the link port, respectively. I move on to the next byte and keep going until the Clear button is pressed. It's crude, but it works: coding the program itself was much more difficult than I thought, and if I didn't have help from IRC (#tcpa on EFNet) or previous z80 experience, the project would have been impossible.
That said, here's the project:
Source code (viewable in any text editor)Executable (needs either an 83+-series calculator or the TI Flash Debugger)