After a few weeks of silence due in part because I felt like I was not achieving what I wanted in the project, Processing wise. A little light has shone (help from Mitchell) and now I feel like things are back on track, which is really pleasing since we only have a couple weeks to go. Certain aspects of the project have changed since my last post. At it’s core I still have Twitter and the city speaking through it, projecting large scale text and animating it in such a manner that would evoke the Lamson sytem that the Cameron Offices had. What has mainly changed are the dynamics of it, how the tweets are gathered and how the text is drawn. As it is at the moment the text is drawn by treating each letter independently so as to be able to add the desired linear mobility to the tweets, opposed to drawing them as a whole chunk of text which makes it too obtuse to work with. In order to be able to have such mobility, I have to source the tweets in real time, it can be done easily with major help from this tutorial . So while I haven’t yet fully let go of the idea of curating the tweets since I still feel that it could make the content of the project more interesting. There are two factors to consider A code and B the intention of the project. A, is the fact that I still can’t work out in Processing how to treat each letter independently when getting the text out of a .txt file of harvested tweets. And B is more along the lines of intention and what the project will say. I thought about this while working on the project and reading the live tweets. If the intention of the project is tapping into the works of the city and letting it speak via tweets about it. Then sourcing the tweets unfiltered and in real time would thoroughly achieve that. Even though they might enter into dull, superficial, offensive or even spam territory that is what is being written. To a certain extend a true reflection of the city is being projected and maybe curating the tweets in a way would hinder that reflection.
I’m also posting a screenshot of the Processing sketch running with the Keystone library, live tweets and the tweets drawn in different fonts and colours.
