Avant-garde Unicode hypnosis

The Unicode character set is one of the great unsung heroes of computer technology, allowing people around the world to use computers in their own languages. 

Because modern computers were developed by English-speakers, for a long time computers were Anglophone-centric, using the limited Ascii character set (which is why you sometimes see strange characters on websites where non-Ascii accents - é - or signs - ` - have been used). Unicode fixes that by allowing several language sets inside a single font.

Artist Jörg Piringer has made a video of it - each character in the set is displayed, one frame at a time.

There are 65,535 available characters, of which 49,571 are used, so the whole video is around half an hour long. It may sound boring, but with the soundtrack (of which more after the jump) it's strangely hypnotic:

The Metafilter thread in which I read about it points out that the soundtrack, which sounds at first like the random thumps of a drum pad, may actually be the sound of a voice reading each letter but being cut off almost as soon as it begins.

It's oddly reminiscent of Autechre, which gives me a good if tangential excuse to post the band's song Flutter below. Flutter was on the 1994 Anti EP, released to protest the same year's Criminal Justice bill which proposed to criminalise (after a fashion) music with 'repetitive beats'. So Flutter doesn't have any repetitive beats at all. Enjoy: