Unreachable Objects

Obscure Objects of Desire

It’s generally unhelpful to think about the destruction of objects…. Better to think of objects becoming unreachable.

Smallshire, Robert. Bingham, Austin. The Python Apprentice. Sixty-North. (Footnote, Page 220).

In French director Luis Buñel’s 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire the role of the leading female character is played by two different actresses. This move was a creative solution to the dilema the production faced after losing the first actress partway through the film’s shooting due to a “tempestuous argument.”^[1] It’s a living example of reassigning a named reference—“Conchita” in this case—from one object (actress) to another after one has become unreachable. The film, Buñel's last, went on to reap critical aclaim and several award nominations.^[2]

The animation on this page is an adaptation of Mike Bostock's tutorial on the d3js General Update Pattern^[3]. It shows newly created objects flowing into the program space. On each successive iteration as new objects enter, some of the previous ones remain while others lose their relevance, and therefor their attachment to the program. These objects become unreachable and disapear. In this example, when an object with the same name (i.e. alphabetical letter) does reapear, that name has in fact been reasigned to a new object—just like in Buñel's movie.

Managing the flow of data and objects plays an important part in how d3js supports dynamic visualization. d3js is one of the programming languages I will be focusing on in this workbook.

To see more of my current efforts at learning to apply the d3js programming langauage click on the "experimements" nav button at the top of the page.