Title: Fever Nightmare Generator
Type: Shockwave Application
Date: 2001

The Fever Nightmare Generator was built within a one week workshop given by Lia from turux.org about generative, aleatoric design, at the écal.

During this week I discovered this strange effect that has something to with optimisations and rounding in the image scaling algorithm of Macromedia Director. When often scaling an image by only slightly different values, horizontal or vertical scanlines get swallowed, while other get blown up.

I tried to use this effect to create this scary little piece of software that reminds me of the fever nightmare dreams I often had as a kid. They had clear patterns in common, something I couldn't formulate with words. But this piece came quite close to that feeling.

In the applet, the user's simple, fragile drawings all of a sudden come to life and start to pulsate and flow around. They breath, move and overlap like tectonic shifts or blow up and explode in slow-motion. These movements are sometimes very hectic and uncontrollable, but they can also be calm or even still, giving the control back to the user. Together with the growing drawings a soundtrack slowly develops and enforces the atmosphere.

In order to run the generator, click on Fever-Nightmare-Generator.dcr