In the Spring of 2020, as covid19 began to take over the US in general and NYC in particular, I was overwhelmed juggling shifting to remote teaching, a complete lack of childcare, the loss of social interactions, adapting OpenAir to be completely online, and the overall dramatic changes in day to day life. I had to abandon all creative work, which began to impact my mental health.
Inspired by Rhizome and OpenProcessing"Tiny Sketch" competition and other artists I'd seen tweeting sketches, I decided to start a practice of coding small daily generative art Processing Sketches and tweeting them out as a creative outlet.
Beginning on June 28 of 2020, I wrote a Processing sketch every day for 144 consecutive days(16 x 9 = 144, more on this later), with the following constraints: 1) The sketch must be started from scratch, completed, documented, and shared on the same day 2) It must never "end" (ie, pixels must continue to change indefinitely) 3) All code used to generate the sketch must fit into a tweet (at that time, the limit was 280 characters). 4) The sketch must run in the Processing IDE if the code was simply copied and pasted from the tweet (ie, not additional libraries or files required) 5) Each sketch must be 480 x 480 pixels 6) Ideally, it had to look cool Given that each sketch was 480 x 480 pixels and that there were 144 in total, they could be compiled into a 16 x 9 grid that has the resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels, or the exact dimensions of an 8k video. You can find the final video on Youtube or in the embed above (this is only a 4k version, since Youtube does not allow 8k videos at this time). Several other artists took up the hashtag and still post sketches with it. I still occasional post a new one as well. Unfortunately, the game "Persona 5 Tactica" co-opted the #p5t hashtag in 2023, but you can still find some of the top #p5t sketches on X with this search.
If you are interested in learning more about #p5t or displaying the video, please contact me.