Trance opera—Spente le Stellebe dramaticmore quotes

# infinity: large

DNA on 10th — street art, wayfinding and font

# data visualization + art

Telling a story about infinity is tricky,
especially a short one.

# Infinity in Just Over Six Minutes

Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
— Robert Browning

Max Cooper at the London Barbican Hall performing Yearning for the Infinite. (Michal Augustini)

# making of the video

The video was created with a custom-made kinetic typography system that emulates a low-fi terminal display. The system is controlled by a plain-text configuration file that defines scenes and timings—there is no GUI. There is also no post-processing of any kind, such as After Effects. Everything that you see in the final video was generated programatically. The creation process took about a month.

## video length and format

The original music score for Aleph 2 is 6 minutes and 34 seconds in length.

The score tempo is 118 bpm (1.967 beats per second, 0.082 beats per frame). There are 194.1 measures in the video (29.5 measures per minute, 0.492 measures per second, 0.020 measures per frame).

The video format is 24 fps, so the track comprises 9,473 frames (1440 frames per minute, 48.814 frames per measure, 12.203 frames per beat, 3.051 frames per 16th note).

The typography uses the Classic Console font, expanded by me to include set theory characters such as $\aleph$, $\mathbb{N}$, $\mathbb{R}$, $\notin$, $\varnothing$ and so on.

The video is 16:9 and each frame is rendered at 1,920 × 1,080. Text is set on a grid of 192 columns and 83 rows (maximum of 15,936 characters per frame).

## pipeline

The entire video is first initialized as an $(x,y,z)$ matrix of size 192 × 83 × 9,473 (150,961,728 elements). The $z$ dimension is the time dimension and each matrix slice (e.g. $x,y,1$) corresponds to a given frame.

The video is then built up from a series of scenes. Briefly, this process is single-threaded and takes about 30 minutes and during this time the matrix is populated with text characters. As the scenes are built up, each element in the matrix stays blank or has a colored character assigned to it. Periodically, effects are added such as random glitches. All elements are synchronized to the tempo of the score and transitions can be triggered from drum score midi files. For example, in parts, the background for each frame flashes to the kick and snare. I get into the detail of this below.

Once the matrix has been fully populated, each frame is output to a PNG file (e.g. 000000.png ... 009472.png). Below you can see 10 frames in the range 2490–2499 from the Bijection 2 section of the video at 1:42.

Frame 2490 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2491 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2492 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2493 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2494 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2495 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2496 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2497 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2498 of Aleph 2. (zoom)
Frame 2499 of Aleph 2. (zoom)

The frames were then stitched into a PNG movie in 24-bit RGB color space using ffmpeg.

ffmpeg -thread_queue_size 32 -r 24 -y -i "frames/aleph/%06d.png" $offset$seek -i wav/aleph.wav -pix_fmt rgb24 -avoid_negative_ts make_zero -shortest -r 24 -c:v png -f mov aleph.mov

The .mov file is then converted into DXV format used by the Resolume VJ software that Max Cooper uses in his shows to control the displays.

If you watch the video on YouTube, please know that the YouTube temporal and chroma compression greatly reduces the quality of the original 24-bit RGB master, which was used for the Barbican Hall performance. The YouTube compression bleaches out the vibrant red, which really pops out in the master version, and blurs frames during fast strobing, which neuters parts of the video that are designed to be overwhelming, such as the drop transition to 24 fps strobing during the natural number power set.

## why a custom system?

Here is Max's original direction for the video's narrative and art style.

I want to show ever growing lists of numbers, then split the lists somehow (left/right of screen) and show how you can pair subsets of Aleph 0 / integers with themselves, then show how Cantor's diagonal argument can be used to pair the fractions with the natural numbers, then show his other diagonal argument for proving the reals are greater than Aleph 0, then show the process (very roughly and with maximum artistic licence if necessary) of taking the power set of infinite sets to create larger infinities to get up to Aleph 1, Aleph 2, and maybe further if the system allows. In the end it should just be complete text/number chaos on screen along with the intense chaos of the audio.

We'd have to be very careful to avoid any Matrix reference visually! ... but that low-fi / command line style would be suitable I think.

In terms of animation, the technical requirements were relatively simple. Everything would be rendered with a fixed-width font with no anti-aliasing and the color palette would be very limited (e.g. black, grey, white and a red for emphasis). Nothing other than characters would be drawn (no lines, circles or other geometrical shapes) and there would be no gradients. Basically, very lo-fi and 8-bit.

Despite the fact that I've never made any kind of animation before, I thought that these requirements could be relatively easy to achieve. After all, if worse came to worst, I told myself that I could always generate the video frame-by-frame.

However, it quickly became obvious that traditional keyframe systems could not be easily used to tell our story. Tools like Adobe After effects rely on interpolation between keyframes. But in our video every frame is essentially a keyframe. This meant that any kind of interpolation between scene points would have to be programmed—while After Effects makes it easy to move things around on the screen, it requires scripting to generate content based on lists of numbers, set elements, and so on. And since I have no experience in After Effects, I thought it would be faster to code my own system than to learn After Effects' expression language to (possibly) later discover that what I wanted to do was either hard or practically impossible for me to achieve within our time frame (a month).

I knew that I was reasonably good at prototyping and generating custom visualizations, so it felt safer to create something from scratch.

The final version of the system, which is very much a prototype, is about 6,000 lines of Perl. The Aleph 2 video is built out from about 2,000 lines of plain-text configuration that defines scenes, timings and effects.

## system architecture

It took about a week to figure out how to design the system. As we were building out the video, I iterated between creating the story and creating the system to tell the story. This was iterative and felt very much like trying to simultaneously building and flying a plane.

At times, the entire process would crash down on me because some tiny tweak fundamentally changed how everything worked.

### pesky timing notation

For example, one extremely nagging aspect of the code that I patched only half-way through the entire process had to do with how time was specified. From the start, I made use of measure:beat:16note notation, such as for scene starts and ends (e.g. 2:2 to 4:1 meant a scene started on measure 2 beat 2 and stopped at measure 4 beat 1).

This notation used 1-indexing (e.g. 1:1:1 is the first 16th note of the score). 0-indexing would have been unintuitive because musically one counts beats as 1, 2, 3, 4 and not 0, 1, 2, 3. Importantly, I wanted the way we referred to timings in conversation (e.g. on the "and of 2" of the 4th measure) to be directly reflected in the code.

All this made sense until I needed a notation to express duration. When I started using 1:1 to indicate a duration of 1 measure and 1 beat, I had to reconcile the difference between 1:1 as a point in time and as a duration—the former specified the beginning of the interval (e.g. frame=0) and the latter the end (frame=61). It also took me forever to decide whether the duration of 5 beats should be expressed as 1:2 (e.g. end is start of beat 2) or 1:1 (e.g. end is end of beat 1).

The fact that the video frame rate is 24 fps made things even more complicated. At this frame rate, there are 3.051 frames per 16th note. This meant that any duration of 1 frame (which happens during fast strobing) couldn't be expressed by the integer notation of measure:note:16note. I didn't want to have to write 0:0:0.3278, which seemed a tedious way of saying "1 frame". Furthermore, because frames didn't neatly match up to 16th note boundaries, quite a lot of time is spent checking that timing definitions don't suffer from rounding issues.

In the final video, you'll see the measure timer in the upper right corner. The : between the measure and beat flashes as a red + on the beat (118 bpm). Next to the measure timestamp you'll see a min:sec:frame timestamp and hexadecimal readout of the frame number.

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# Genome Sciences Center 20th Anniversary Clothing, Music, Drinks and Art

Wed 22-01-2020

Science. Timeliness. Respect.

Read about the design of the clothing, music, drinks and art for the Genome Sciences Center 20th Anniversary Celebration, held on 15 November 2019.

Luke and Mayia wearing limited edition volunteer t-shirts. The pattern reproduces the human genome with chromosomes as spirals. (zoom)

As part of the celebration and with the help of our engineering team, we framed 48 flow cells from the lab.

Precisely engineered frame mounts of flow cells used to sequence genomes in our laboratory. (zoom)

Each flow cell was accompanied by an interpretive plaque explaining the technology behind the flow cell and the sample information and sequence content.

The plaque at the back of one of the framed Illumina flow cell. This one has sequence from a patient's lymph node diagnosed with Burkitt's lymphoma. (zoom)

# Scientific data visualization: Aesthetic for diagrammatic clarity

Mon 13-01-2020

The scientific process works because all its output is empirically constrained.

My chapter from The Aesthetics of Scientific Data Representation, More than Pretty Pictures, in which I discuss the principles of data visualization and connect them to the concept of "quality" introduced by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

# Yearning for the Infinite — Aleph 2

Mon 18-11-2019

Discover Cantor's transfinite numbers through my music video for the Aleph 2 track of Max Cooper's Yearning for the Infinite (album page, event page).

Yearning for the Infinite, Max Cooper at the Barbican Hall, London. Track Aleph 2. Video by Martin Krzywinski. Photo by Michal Augustini. (more)

I discuss the math behind the video and the system I built to create the video.

# Hidden Markov Models

Mon 18-11-2019

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
—Rene Magritte

A Hidden Markov Model extends a Markov chain to have hidden states. Hidden states are used to model aspects of the system that cannot be directly observed and themselves form a Markov chain and each state may emit one or more observed values.

Hidden states in HMMs do not have to have meaning—they can be used to account for measurement errors, compress multi-modal observational data, or to detect unobservable events.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Hidden Markov Models. (read)

In this column, we extend the cell growth model from our Markov Chain column to include two hidden states: normal and sedentary.

We show how to calculate forward probabilities that can predict the most likely path through the HMM given an observed sequence.

Grewal, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2019) Points of significance: Hidden Markov Models. Nature Methods 16:795–796.

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2019) Points of significance: Markov Chains. Nature Methods 16:663–664.

# Hola Mundo Cover

Sat 21-09-2019

My cover design for Hola Mundo by Hannah Fry. Published by Blackie Books.

Hola Mundo by Hannah Fry. Cover design is based on my 2013 $\pi$ day art. (read)

Curious how the design was created? Read the full details.

# Markov Chains

Tue 30-07-2019

You can look back there to explain things,
but the explanation disappears.
You'll never find it there.
Things are not explained by the past.
They're explained by what happens now.
—Alan Watts

A Markov chain is a probabilistic model that is used to model how a system changes over time as a series of transitions between states. Each transition is assigned a probability that defines the chance of the system changing from one state to another.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Markov Chains. (read)

Together with the states, these transitions probabilities define a stochastic model with the Markov property: transition probabilities only depend on the current state—the future is independent of the past if the present is known.

Once the transition probabilities are defined in matrix form, it is easy to predict the distribution of future states of the system. We cover concepts of aperiodicity, irreducibility, limiting and stationary distributions and absorption.

This column is the first part of a series and pairs particularly well with Alan Watts and Blond:ish.

Grewal, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2019) Points of significance: Markov Chains. Nature Methods 16:663–664.