Aubrey Birdwell

Snake Eyes is an experimental, interactive, viewer-generated two-channel ASCII video artwork. The core of the installation is a custom mechanical interface driven by a double pendulum, translating a two-encoder position data stream into a signal used by a custom ASCII video generator. The title, Snake Eyes, comes from the idea of a lucky or unlucky dice roll—when the pendulum’s two arms align—triggering a spontaneous deterioration in the ASCII vector field. While subtle, the concept relates to bit rot in media materials, where information decays over time in stored memory systems.

 A double pendulum acts as a continuous signal source, its motion measured at two joints and transmitted to a pair of CRT displays. Each screen constructs a dense field of ASCII characters animated by the shared data stream. Oscillatory motion produces rippling disturbances across an otherwise stable surface.

Moments of agreement generate brief intensifications—“lucky” alignments—while divergence introduces turbulence, washing out the image. Though both displays are driven by the same system, they drift in and out of sync as separate interpretations.

Rooted in the coupled instability of the double pendulum, the work reveals how a single system can contain internal divergence, which becomes amplified through measurement and reconstruction.