A few weeks ago I attended Contakt, a yearly event hosted by the people from Minus. I came out feeling completely blown away, and the memories of the event flashed obsessively through my head for many days after. But apart from the musical side of things I was most taken by the visuals, the work of Ali M. Demirel and Burak Arikan. In a similar way to Minus’ sound, these visuals were MINIMAL, but had a catastrophic impact that was jaw-dropping.

Here’s an interview that might give you an idea of how Ali plugs into the Minus team.

One of the setups they made was based on a grid of dots, each with their own small square-shaped boundaries, watch it in action here, made by Burak. This is one of many other ideas based on a single concept called Meta Control: “Collection of visual/kinetic performative artifacts. These software pieces have a single organizing principle: their control mechanisms are not hidden and often exposed.”

The grid idea in particular has been stuck in my mind since I first saw it, probably because it was one of the few that I managed to figure out, so yesterday I tried to re-build it in Flash.

Stupidly, before I started building it I didn’t look for a video to refresh my memory, in fact I’ve just realized by watching this video that he didn’t actually use any vertical/horizontal lines to connect the dots, which is how I built mine.

Anyway, you can check out my first version, which I’ve creatively named MinusGrid here. Maybe I’ll upgrade it one day.

I also made a mac screensaver: download