New work showing at Kudos Gallery
For the next two weeks you can see some of my new work at Kudos Gallery, as an auxiliary to the COFA Annual 2009. It’s a group show, exhibiting the work created by participants in the Porosity Studio this semester. My work is a piece about Shanghai, a computer program written for the in Z80 assembly for the ZX Spectrum 48k. Essentially it is an image slide show, with some simple transitions. The challenging parts were the conversion of the images to something that looks half-decent through the Spectrum’s limited colour palette, and compressing the image data to fit in the ~32k of usable RAM.
I was chuffed to actually install my Speccy in a gallery setting. It really is a beautiful machine, and one which is relatively unknown in Australia (in contrast to its contemporary, the Commodore 64). It’s concerning that a power interruption might cause the program to be lost from memory, and force me to come back in to re-load it from “tape” (ie, a DOS program that emulates a tape), but I think this volatility is part of the charm of the project.
If you’re interested, head down to Napier St in Paddington and check it out. Once the show has closed I will post some documentation and a TAP image of the program so that you may run it in an emulator, or on a real Speccy if you are lucky enough to own one. =)