.walkion trace made by trolley as executed during transmediale 04, Berlin
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EXPLANATION
To us the greatest miracle about Pacman has always been the transportation portals on the left & right side of the maze. Pacman goes in at one end & comes back out on the other side of the screen. Where is Pacman in between?
While trying to device ways to honour the peripatetical invention of quaternions, the harbinger of 4D mathematics, by using them in a .walk application, the answer to this fundamental problem in Pac-Phenomenology came to us during a walk. In one of those Eureka moments that define art & science, it suddenly all made sense: Pacmans maze only seems 2-dimensional. In reality the 2 vertical edges are bend towards each other in such a way that the 2 ends meet, making the pacverse looking somewhat similar to a tube from a 3d-perspective. Pacman & the pac-cannibals can't see this, as it's outside their range of perception. This traversing of dimensions is like what travelling through a black hole would be to us. Pacman scientists probably will think that these gateways enable pacmannians to travel through time as well as through space.QUE PASA?
Like Pacman, algorithmic walks are executed on a 2 dimensional flatland. Wouldn't it be great to entertain the Transmediale 04 massive by .walking a game of Pacman with them? In order to this we created our own quaternion-like algorithm. We call it a .walkion.
It looks like this:
W=[2][1][(+,-)]
As you can see the .walkion is a 3 term array to be applied on a whole-number grid. The first variable tells the psychogeographer how many steps to move along the X-axis, the second variable applies to the Y-axis & the third variable contains for both movements the direction. It's pure geometripatetic funk.
If you want to simulate a gateway like Pacman, you'd only have to add an instruction like this to your .walk code:
if (W[1]>10) W[1]=0;
Once your position on the X-axis becomes bigger then 10 it becomes 0 again, meaning that you suddenly have moved backwards while going forward! Eski!
Too bad it doesn't work like that in the real world. Unless you would use an extra dimension, like tunnels.
To find a resolution that would work in the physical world, we found we had to turn Pacman somewhat into Pong! A PingPacPong.walkion.
10 by 10 grid, Pacman ("^") starts at middle (5,5) & moves W=[2][1][(+,+)] see what happens:
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und so weiter...
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The system is now in loop while Pacman follows it's vector as determined by the third term in the .walkion. In stead of (the impossible) horse-leaps across the field we could temporarily change the vector to get us at a course that intersects the horse-leap algorithm. It's not perfect (but what is[aaahhh]?) but at least it get's you at the same place the hyper~jump would have. It will be fun! (and it was [aaahhh]!!!)
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