This animation of the Breedster universe mapped onto a toroid is fantastic.

Around 1 minute and 2 seconds into the animation of the expanding insect cosmos, a pattern emerges of a heart, described by hundreds of individual breedsters acting in concert. It takes about 2 seconds in the animation to form, corresponding to and remains there, more or less inviolate for the remaining 40 seconds, like some sentimental insect Arcosanti, or the Burning Man playa as sponsored by Hallmark.

The animation was compiled:

“of hourly Grid snapshots taken from 2004-04-09 02:00 until 2004-05-22 12:00, at 10 fps.”

Therefore (and correct me if i’m wrong) every second is 10 hours in real time, meaning the heart emerged in 20 hours, and remained for 400 hours or nearly 17 days.

I guess my next questions would be

• how did the heart get started?
• how did the idea spread?
• how was it’s construction coordinated, if at all?
• how long, in subjective time, would this structure have ‘lasted’ from the breedster insect-avatar point-of-view?

Hopefully, Breedster will have some longevity, and so will these pattern plotting exercises – perhaps through this playful format somethings we think we know about how cities and societies form and grow can be explored.

From the delightfully-irreverent “symposium”* “On Fornication And Genetics in The Breedster Age”

“How to write a manifesto in an age disgusted with them? The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence. Breedster’s problem is the opposite: it is a mountain range of evidence without manifesto.”

—
ADDENDUM:
Conversation with Foe in IM:

FOE: “see I told you breedster was about more than just copulating with strangers”

FOE: “it’s pretty much dead now since they started giving us diseases though”

ME: “well, life’s like that”

ME: “you just see the civilisation and great works of art in the historical view, but not all the copulation and diseases that people were really caring about at the time…”

Move over, Simon Schama! Ach. Lunchtime.