How can I make something I couldn’t have made before with type in proscessing?
I was excited for this project to be back in processing, a workflow I feel probably most comfortable with – that and Arduino / physical computing – . However I had no idea what I wanted to do…
At first I just messed about with the same constructs I would use previously but my subject being text…
This was just an animated piece of text that I had spinning round. I did this with sin and cosin and had things bouncing and created a sort of 3D effect.
Once we had had our tutorials I felt it was time to actually start thinking about what I wanted to produce. I had no idea what the end goal was aesthetically however I knew that I wanted to work with a large amount of text, or data.
I found that the idea of just taking a copy of… the bible. Not sure where that example came from… was a bit static. I wanted to create something that could be flexible. When a book is written the words never change. Books are boring.
I started to think of different sources of text, and purely on a whim found a Wikipeidia API, Wikimedia. I now was able to get page contents, titles, images, you name it from any wikipedia page.
I stated by taking a random page and getting all the internal links from it and just randomly displaying them…
This was really interesting but aesthetically awful and to me meaningless. However I had a program that could now fetch this data.
Inspired by the Wikipedia game I wanted to feed this data back into the program to start crawling through wikipedia. My version would get all the links from a “starting page” and pick one at random, go to that page and continue. This took alot of work to reformat the page titles and use URL encoding to be able to pass them back into my program, and after alot of tweaking I got it working just. There has been a continuous bug finding mission all week…
Now I had this working I started to think how to display.
This was interesting, inspired by a peice of work that had been siting on the axidraw all week, an example from creative coding 02 I think?? I will find a photo and upload it!!
Through out my tweaks of the aesthetics and display mechanics I was finding more issues with the program that I had to fix.
About half way through week two I also lost about half the program after processing crashed, It’s fair to say I need to get better at versioning!
I wanted to work in 3D at somepoint and for it to be one of the outcomes of this idea. I should say that I was inspired by out talk with Edwin at the case room to take an idea and really focus on it and find all the ways it can be explored, hence why all my work this project has surrounded this idea of my Wiki crawler.
As I was saying I wanted to work in 3D and have this spiders web of links emanate from the centre and have the canvas “zoom” in and through the links. sort of how they go hyper speed in Star Wars
This proved to be too much to take on as I hadn’t even gotten happy with the asthetics of my work in 2D first. So I went back to that to work on it.
I first stated by creating a fading affect with filter(BLUR)
So you could still see the previous link(s) and then the rest would fade away in the background.
I then messed around with the idea of having “choice” of links to create even more of a spiders web or as I called it branch system
This was nice but very buggy as the code I had written was not quite flexible enough to be used for this. Even though I had sperate functions for Getting Links and Formatting links etc it was had to implement with the way I had previously been drawing things. However it was still interseting.
I then thought I should look into colour even though I really liked the monochromatic look, it didn’t take away from what was being displayed. Accidentally though everything became red…
I then decided I needed an easy way for the viewer to be able to see how many. links its been since what ever the starting page is. As the entire point of the work is to see the incredible short “links” or connections between subjects and the contradictory nature of them sometimes.
Here I added the bar along the bottom to show the journey that has been taken from the seed page to the current, and how many steps its taken.
Concluding
I will completely admit that I didn’t take this project in the most traditional direction typographically speaking an that I do regret. However I had a lot of fun making this program and I think it speaks much more to the narrative element of the brief. I found it really interesting how just very simple short text can still tell an incredibly interesting story. How we and the internet are all intertwined, this aimed to show the “network” of things that we talk about or try to visualise in our heads when discussing the internet.
I would like to return to this project in the future on a personal basis to work on the aesthetics. I really like the simplicity of the type however I would like to make the entire thing three dimensional. Make it feel as though you are moving through the story through the connections of pages. But overall I really enjoyed the technical aspects of this project however I regret not taking advantage of the time to work on my typography more.
LEARNING JOURNAL 