Professor James Duesing‘s 1990 computer animated work “Maxwell’s Demon” is part of the screening “I Hate the Internet: Techno-Dystopian Malaise and Visions of Rebellion” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on March 12. The screening also includes “Drop City” by Peter Burr BFA ’02.
A post-apocalyptic computer animated vision of humanity lost in an industrial wasteland, “Maxwell’s Demon” was animated on a low-cost, consumer computer model, an IBM PC. The tape takes its title from an early 20th-century physics theory postulating the existence of an impossible intelligence, a being that knew the exact location, energy, and direction of every particle in the entire universe—something akin to your home computer, but a lot bigger.