My writing of blog entries has been on the slow side of things for this project yet the process has been thick with questions and ideas. These questions have been more on a conceptual level rather than a technical (Processing) one. In my last entry I wrote about how the project was breaking away from the original idea of using the collection’s images as the raw material. This breakage has refocused the project on the textual data present in the NMA’s dataset, by focusing on text as the material to work with the conceptual framework of the project has also shifted. The project’s fundamentals are still based on the practice of remix as a creative tool yet its raw material is now solely derived from text.
Focusing on the textual data as a raw material has led me to think about the nature of text and what role it will play within this project, that is how will the text function within the whole of the composition. My main concern being whether or not the text should be readable or would it be present solely as a form. I decided a combination of the two was the best option, in that there would be parts of the composition where the text could be discerned and read but there would also be parts where it would gather as form making blobs. In other words, the text on the screen would be used as the paint to make new images.
I also had to think about what text I would be using within the compositions, would I be drawing with all the text from the dataset at once (could that even be possible considering the size of the dataset )or break it down into groups of some type and what would be the guidance for this grouping. Breaking the text down into groups was the logical step, on the one hand the dataset is already arranged in that manner and by using HashMap in the Processing code one can virtually make any type of grouping. On the other hand there would be a certain relevance within the resulting images, the resulting images could be of all the titles from a given collection or all the collection names from within the whole of the NMA’s collection.
The following images are a few of the experiments I’ve done so far with the ideas explored above. The first three drawings were done with the titles from all the photographic postcards within the collection and the fourth is of the titles from one specific collection (Superannuation Fund Investment Trust collection ), the collection was generated at random from a list of all the collections that makeup the NMA’s collection.
