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Video 6 Sacred 100-Pace Snake Program Notes
The Rukai tribe of Taiwanese aborigines occupy the Maolin district in Kaoshiung county and the Peinan district in Taitung county.Their villages principally occupy the mountain foothills between 500 meters and 1500 meters in altitude. According to Rukai creation myths, one legend has it that the Rukai ancestors originated from the hundred-pace snake Agkistrodon acutus . Thus the distinctive diamond-shaped head of this highly poisonous snake, symbolizing the Rukai ancestors, is a common feature of wood carvings on ancestral posts, door lintels and door leaves, as well as of body tattoos, embroidery on clothing and other daily utensils. An ancient legend of the Rukai tells the story of Ho-ssu, the tribeswoman who cooked and ate the sacred hundred-pace snake. Her husband's family discovered that she had been secretly serving them the meat, and they attributed their increasing weight-loss to the fact that the had violated the spirit of this holiest of snakes. They drove Ho-ssu from the village, and she wandered the countryside, eating each hundred-pace snake she found. As she ate, she spat out the bones, each of which turned into a live hundred-pace snake. Since live hundred-pace snakes sprang up wherever Ho-ssu spat out their bones, the route she followed has to this day marked the area where hundred-pace snakes are found in the largest numbers. The Compositional Process Sacred 100-Pace Snake was composed using algorithmic congruence procedures; that is, the video and computer music were generated using similar granulation and formal techniques on both the local and macro-dimensional levels. The piece bears a superficial resemblance to several other videos I have completed in that video granulation techniques were applied to the same set of thirty-two, 2x2-inch, (abstract) glass plates I used as the visual material for four other videos. However, the build-up of the initial, pre-granulation montage and the mode of final rendering differ in this case in several respects. Step I. Controlled flow processes were applied to thirty-one, 2-inch square, glass plates using inks, dyes, and viscous fluids; the resulting images formed abstract patterns bearing a resemblance to stained glass windows. Step II. Pairs of the abstract glass plates were sandwiched together, and then macroscopically photographed in digital form to extract segments of the individual images. Step III. Computer video software was used to sequence the digital stills and render them as a several multiple-layer montages of moving images, each of 2-3 minutes duration. (The montages were built using simple video transitions and effects such as cross-dissolve, image mirroring, etc.) Step IV. The resulting video montages were re-rendered and stored as a stream of single-frame bitmap images. Next, the single-frame images were grouped into separate collections of contiguous frames, and then were distributed using a reordering algorithm that I wrote in the C programming language and rendered as a single video montage. Step V. The final step in the video production was the placement of copies of the video montage in a 9-screen matrix within the overall 720 x 480 MPEG viewing screen. Identical copies of the montage were rendered at slightly different frame rates (as percentages of the original speed, and then each copy was assigned to a location in the 3 x 3 screen matrix as follows:
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