PHLOGISTON is an ever-changing minimalist generative video piece using strategies of drunk walks, logical operators and cellular automata rules to produce a lively monochromatic tiled bitscape. 

The title of the piece refers to an 18th century notion of a combustible substance that was thought to exist in flammable materials. In this work, the “burning” pixels ebb and flow from ember to flame, and alternate between architectural grids and organic cell clusters.

Since there are over 2.4 * 10^173 possible graphical combinations of the grid, if PHLOGISTON generated a unique image every frame, it would require about 1.9 times the current age of the universe to exhaust all possibilities. (Based on Bitfill code from Andrew Benson’s Jitter Recipes Book 4)