In 1876, J. W. Gibbs penned an essay entitled 'On the Equilibrium of Heterogenous Substances', unwittingly founding a new field of enquiry in the form of thermodynamics. In his epochal work, Gibbs outlined the laws governing the stability of matter, introducing a notion which, by the end of the nineteenth century, was widely referred to as 'metastability'. These physical states are temporarily stable but far from the global minima which represents thermodynamic equilibrium: The state of least free energy which Gibbs suggests substances should in principle adopt.

In this live software work, stills sampled from a popular video used by the 'shader' community to demo their code—a green screen performance of 'I'm a Slave 4 You' by Britney Spears—are subjected to techniques of chromatic advection. The movements of the performer shock the equilibrium of a chromatic fluid, glimpsing many metastable configurations which eventually succumb to dispersion.

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