# still life

still life is an interactive painting on your computer screen. It responds to touch and to movement, to tugs and to gusts of wind. But, physicality comes with permanence — there is no “undoing” a tear in the fabric.

With still life, I aimed to respond to the question of how to possibly imbue physicality into a digital object. The piece mimics some of the physicality of a real painting, such as shaking and grazing. I focused on the destructibility of physical objects; all interactions with a physical object leave some form of permanent mark on them, be it wear or outright damage. Digital objects however have the strange privilege of living in a world without permanence. It is possible to undo or restore a document or an image to the precise same state that it was a week ago. Aside from the physical bit rot that happens to a device, it is possible for a digital object to stay entirely unchanged for years with next to no effort.

Much of the aesthetic inspiration for the piece came, surprisingly, from the sound effect in Hollow Knight: Silksong that plays when you rip apart a rosary necklace. You can hear the beads scattering and strings snapping. This brought me toward the idea of a pixel art that is “weaved” together like fabric, with threads running in two directions and holding the object together. In dividual pixels of a piece of pixel art are then beads within this strange tapestry, and tugging at a single bead brings the whole connected string along. I am intrigued by this concept and may even revisit it at some point.