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a study on the number 3 in pre-christian philosophy


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The Number Three has been a crucial reference in many philosophical theories from early ages, while religions also inherited and injected meanings from and to this numerical, geometrical, and magical entity.

This source code depicts a vision of the number three as it was conceptualized in pre-christian philosophy, following, in particular, the picture traced by Pitagoras' fragments and the subsequent theorizations done by its scholars.

Pitagoric and Orfic religions used a geometrical way to represent numbers with units displaced by a fixed scheme: 

1       2       3        4        5         6         7
        o       o        o o      o o       o o o     o o o
o                 o                   o                     o
        o       o        o o      o o       o o o     o o o
As we can see from the rightmost middle point, which is present only in odd numbers, these geometrical figures are either open or closed: we can imagine them with a line crossing in the middle, from left to right. The tuples of numbers, which nowadays we simply consider odd/even, were associated by Pitagoreans with different properties: 
   odd/even
    masculine/feminine
     determined/undetermined
      limited/unlimited
The number three was choosen as the subject of this study: keeping in mind all its attributes and the way to represent it, I followed my imagination in a picture traced in C language, which can be compiled and executed to render a live interactive painting.

In fact you can interact by blowing into a microphone in order to mark your immediate presence in front of the code painting: to provoke a turbulence in the water surface in which it is immersed, a menace to the finiteness of the number Three.

Your presence and interaction in the space determined by this painting (its eye watching you, its ear listening to you, its surface reacting to your voice) is realizing a unity of Time, Space, and Action. The painting is about the triplet that Aristoteles defined as the three fundamental attributes of Tragedy.

TECHNICAL OVERVIEW

Three in its source code form is composed of 13459 lines, 49272 words, 324071 letters of C, C++ and assembler code, it makes use of the framework provided by FreeJ, a free software developed by me, also included in recent Debian distributions.

FreeJ on it's own also implements a digital instrument for video livesets, featuring realtime rendering of multi-layered video from multiple sources and chaining effect filters on each layer.
It has been developed with performance and modularity in mind, a performant instrument for video livesets and a free and open framework wich can be used to paint your own code.

Three as well FreeJ are free softwares released under the GNU General Public License; they come with absolutely no warranty and you are welcome to copy, modify and redistribute them (refer to the license for details).

The operating system on which Tre is running is GNU/Linux, shaped in a customized version of the dyne:bolic distribution mantained by me wich includes contributions from thousands of people from all over the world, freely (as of speech!) available online from the website: dynebolic.org.

Selected source code:

  • 'freej.cpp'(main function)
  • 'layer.cpp'(code that handles the printing on the screen)
  • 'linklist.cpp'(code that keeps layers and effects inside dynamic arrays)
  • 'layer.h'(class declaration for the layer)
  • 'v4l_layer.cpp'(code that feeds the video image of the person standing in front of the screen to the layer)

    • Execution

    The code can be downloaded as a tar.gz compressed archive from ftp.dyne.org/performance/tre.tar.gz. It can be compiled and executed on GNU/Linux, a webcamera and a microphone are required for proper interaction.

    You can download the ISO image of the bootable CD realizing the installation from ftp.dyne.org/dynebolic/ad-hoc/CODeDOC/dynebolic-1.0b-CODeDOC.iso (large download: 441M).

    Author

    You can discover more about me and about what i do on rastasoft.org and dyne.org.

    I'm a free software programmer, performer and emigrant, author and mantainer of GNU GPL'd softwares MuSE, FreeJ and Hasciicam, of the live distribution dyne:bolic GNU/Linux.

    I received the Intermedium.02 Award in ZKM and exhibited among other places in I LOVE YOU (MAK Frankfurt), Transmediale.02 (Berlin), Readme 2.3 (Helsinky), Negotiations 2003 (Toronto).

    Disclaimer

    FreeJ and its derivative work 'Tre' is
copyleft 2001 - 2003 by Denis Jaromil Rojo
heartfelt thanks to Christiane Paul, Iris Mayr,
Stefano Cinti aka Shezzan.

This source code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Public License as published 
by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License,
or (at your option) any later version.