No New Ideas

This is an experimental comic about the idea that there are no new ideas. It's never the same twice. Use the space key to pause/play.

Gareth Hopkins invited artists to do something with a page of his abstract graphic novel Petrichor (which included the text "There are no new ideas") and send it back to him. He posted the resulting two dozen or so pages and titled the project "No New Ideas"; I felt it might be interesting to feed them all to Aleph Null (online, generative, interactive software I wrote) as an experimental comic. I had an email conversation with Jim Leftwich about the idea that there are no new ideas; I threw that text in too. I was reading Rosalind Krauss's well-known essay about the grid; I included some of that too—plus another graphic page I made enumerating some good ideas.

Also, I made a bunch of high-res screenshots of this piece (3840x2160). The screenshots are interestingly zoomable. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in/out or, if you're mobile, tap and hold to zoom in; double tap and hold to zoom out. The space key toggles pause/play. The screenshots are displayed in software I wrote called Slidvid. There's another slideshow of 1920x1080 screenshots.

I also made some videos of this piece: video 1, video 2, video 3.

Thanks to Andrew Topel, Alfredo Santos, Amy Hopkins, Bill Hopkins, Chloe Starling, Chris Joseph, Cindy Lou, Daniel Bristow Bailey, Gareth A Hopkins, Hazel R Web, Jenny Robins, Jeremy Bushnell, Kele Web, Ladenia Jones, Martha Hopkins, Michæl Orzechowski, Nick Bryan, Piotr Szreniawski, Rosaire Appel, Sarah Daniels, Steve Thompson and Tony Edwards for their graphics.