2024 Bridges Conference Short Film Festival

david van brink

Filmmakers

david van brink

Artist

Independent

Santa Cruz, California, USA

david.van.brink@gmail.com

http://omino.com

http://metareal.net

Statement

In the first or second grade, we did an activity of "how to write a letter". Start with sheet of paper, say Dear so and so, some stuff, signed Love your name here. And then to put it in the envelope, you must fold the paper in thirds. Being a very precise lad I wanted it to be exact. So I folded lenghthwise in half, quarters, and then eighths and further subdividing and somehow it sort-of dawned on me that none of those folds was ever going to be exactly one third. I've basically been grumpy ever since.

Films

Image for entry 'Polyomino Gears and Polycube Machines in the Metareal World'

Polyomino Gears and Polycube Machines in the Metareal World

5:00:00

Handmade game engine, Simplified physics concept, Discovery of polyomino gears, Crafting of polycube machines, and music, video and animation by David Van Brink

2024

Watch

In crafting a game/physics engine for my game “Metareal”, I aimed for a brutally simple model. But even the simplest systems may have intriguing consequences. An interesting category of machines turned out to be possible in the Metareal world. It has perhaps a glancing similarity to the task of building machines in Conway’s Life cellular automata. In this rarified space I found myself asking and answering questions about how it all works. How many cycles does each kind of gear use? Can arbitrary movements be induced? In this short un-narrated film I’ll share some of the machines I have discovered, and hopefully provoke you to ask some of these same questions. Or simply enjoy the oddly familiar movements.