Week 4.2
In the most common times where graphics are used to communicate information, wherein the experiment, I started to look at the invert of the communication path, where designed text became the first end of communication, and what sort of graphics would the designed text presents? Do they still hold the communication value?
Goal: writing a text with p5js functions without thinking about what would occur when the code is up and running.
Learning
https://p5js.org/reference/#group-Color
In the reference section of p5js there are lots of examples of word based instructions. I started to browse the reference list and learning from them, to see what words could be used as part of the creative writing.
Other functions that could be common to use:
Const — constant (a keyword that defines a variable or pointer as unchangeable.)
Written Response Drafts
Draft 01
Exploration：
In the process of using the tool, I felt there was a strong causal relationship between the instructions and functions in P5js and the images generated by these instructions. The textual instructions played a very important role in the tool. This has inspired me to think about the path of communication. Usually, the path of graphic communication could be considered as exploring the message through imageries, but with p5js itself, the communication channel is inverted; images and graphics are being made with the text instructions and sometimes unexpectedly with the placement and order of those functions.
Enquiry:
Thus in the next studio practice, I will further explore that to invert the path of communication:
Is it still possible for textual coding functions to communicate graphical message?
How would they perform?
Will the (original) textual message be the same?
Proposal:
To approach the enquiry, I will try to use p5js coding instructions to translate text excerpts as purely as possible or to create text content (e.g., poems, sentences with imagery sense) and explore whether the code would still run successfully and what kind of images will be generated at the point.
Draft 02
Following my proposal in practice of the project, I chose the Conditional Design Manifesto as a text excerpt for the conversion of text to P5.js instructions. From the week process, some previous questions raised could be answered: firstly, due to the limitations of the p5js directive vocabulary, it is almost impossible for adjectives, verbs and adverbs that appear in normal textual writing language to be directive and become coding instructions while adhering to the original text to the greatest extent possible. Also, in the process of conversion, the sequential words and phrases of the text are heavily adjusted and reduced in order to get the code to work. Therefore, I could only declare the text parts as variables and substitute the variables as symbols in the existing P5.js instructions. Therefore, the graphic generated in this way hardly conveys the same information as the original text, but the resulting image has a certain regularity.
In reading the book “Uncreative Writing” by Kenneth Goldsmith, Goldsmith’s notion of appropriation and re-purposing of existing texts is relevant to my practice, where text is re-purposed in coding platforms, in addition to their traditional role of conveying information, they are also given the role of communicating logical instructions to make code run successfully.
In the chapter “Parsing the new illegibility”. Goldsmith gives examples of parsing text in computing, where text is used as a vehicle for description and documentation in those examples. In conjunction with my attempts to declare the vocabulary in my project to form a running code based on original text excerpts with substitutional variables, I realised that there is a de-meaning of text in e-computing, its symbolic nature.
Thus, my enquiry has been shaped by looking at the re-purpose of text in digital coding from “Uncreative Writing”:
Could text abandon its original message and meaning to become a symbol for visual communication in the context of a programming language?