So here’s the results of a semesters worth of coding. Special thanks and three cheers to Daniel Shiffman for being an amazing instructor and all round super guy. I’m taking Programming A to Z with him next semester. Programming was the not something I expected to enjoy at ITP, but after Shiffman’s ICM class I’m looking forward to getting closer to attaining pure command line functionality (just like Roy).

See my previous ICM posts for more background info on the project.

A low-res movie of my project in action:

Click To Play

Some photos of the completed project:

The arduous process of hollowing a book:

Read the rest of this entry »

So progress has been made. I’ve secured a 5×7 LCD screen from my friend Christian Croft, and I’ve got a seperate code written that uses the same code as the one below to record video input and then render that into text mosaic form. Now the trick is to merge the new code with the old code and organize them in such a way that they function together and that the code shifts smoothly from loading the image to picking up video.

I’ve also decided to use Joyce’s Ulysses as my book encasement. My reasons for this choice are lightly explained in the description below, which I submitted for the Winter show:

The act of reading consists of a twofold relationship between text and reader. A text is a world wrought with careful choices and composed of deliberate details. Internal mechanisms guide or manipulate the reader and set certain processes in motion; circumstances are dealt, limitations are imposed, and positions are impelled.

Though a reader may believe it a space in which to freely dwell, explore, and contemplate, in actuality a text is a set of built-in biases, hidden protocols, and inherent agendas determining how meaning is expressed and transferred.

Yet textual meaning is contingent on the reader’s engagement with the text, and all meaning ineluctably bound to the reader’s subjective mode of interpreting and filtering information, which is framed by the reality the reader inhabits. As it is this aspect of interpretation that initially determines how a text is understood, received meaning can cohere in a form far from what is intended.

Intertext is a visual analogy illuminating this two-way relationship between reader and text. It represents how a text both forms and informs the reader as well as how the reader molds and animates the text. Encased within a hollowed version of James Joyce’s Ulysses (chosen for its physical and metaphorical depth, its continual susceptibility to new modes of interpretation, and the novel’s play with how meaning is extracted by the reader) is an LCD screen displaying Joyce’s image as rendered by a mosaic of the novel’s text. While the reader peers into the book, the words shift from showing the representation of Joyce to an image of the viewer captured by a nearby camera.
—-

Coming from an Lit background, I’m interested in the merging of literature (or the novel or tracts or text or the written word arranged in some way motivated by aesthetic or philosophical intent) with digital technology. I’ve been playing with text mosaics in the Processing language, specifically implementing an author’s text into an array that forms the pixels of a paiting, photo or representation of that author, and I want to create a processing app that visualizes my feeling of what the act of reading does to the reader.

My idea is create an app that does the above described, but also have the text mosaic dissipate and have the words scramble across the screen, but the reconstitute as an image of the app’s viewer. I’m thinking of finding a small lcd screen, placing it in a hollowed out book, placing an iSight or something above the book, and have the app triggered when the book is open. In effect, the viewer will open this strange book with a usb cord hanging out of it, see the image of the author as comprised of the author’s text, begin to read the text, be mesmerized by the fancifal swirling of text, and the gasp as the text shows their own face.

I’m excited by this. I really think powerful writing can reconsititute and change an individual. I’m about 1/4 of the way through the coding, and have yet to begin on the hollow book encasement or finding an lcd. I’ll post the progress as it goes.

What I’m currently working with (click on the picture): +++++

I’ve also started working with live video text mosaics, and am working with how to load a text file that will constitute the image. Once I get this together I’ll have to find a way to merge the two so that the author’s text portrait merges with the viewer’s image via a color change or something.

Here’s my snail-paced progress with processing:

Read the rest of this entry »