Artist Statement / Three ideas

Artist Statement:

Andrew makes art pieces that are designed to make people thing about specific concepts. He achieves this through the use of technologies that he learned in college as a CS major and through psychological principles to impact the way that people think about things. He uses a combination of digitally created visuals and physical devices to make sure there is impact on the viewer/user.

“A Working Community”

The goal of this project is to make people aware of the implied trust that we all have in each other. For example I trust people will not attack me as I walk around campus and people will not cheat me on agreements. I want to achieve this though some sort of community simulation using digital technologies and hopefully some physical devices.

“Cyborg Art”

For this project I want the viewer to interact with a computer program in order to create a unique work of art. They could interact through gesture recognition or just changing some values that get fed into the algorithm. Harold Cohen inspired the idea and his artwork he makes with a program he made called “AARON”.

“Meaning Map”

For this project I want to visualize a mapping of word meanings. It would be something like a graph and each point on the graph would be a word and it would connect to other words to form the graph. For example ‘banana’ would connect to ‘monkey’, ‘apple’, ‘slip’. This could be used to show differences between dialects or differences between languages.

Assignment 2 (Visual Poetry)

For this project we had to use words from some text to make new sentences out of another text. For my source text I chose the text from a computer science textbook. For the other text I choose song lyrics. The song was "Some nights" by Fun.

The main goal of this project was to form new random sentences and visualize them in some cool creative way. I decided to focus more on visualizing the background process of how you create the random sentences. It starts out by the source text scrolling across the screen and being filtered into group by parts-of-speech. Then the other text fades on the screen, then turns into the form or just the parts-of-speech. Then you can see random words moving into place to create the new sentences. Once the words are in order. You click on more time and the words will move slightly letting you know you are in edit mode.

In edit mode you can adjust the spacing between words, randomize the color of words, randomize the fonts, and randomize the font sizes.

- Pressing the 'w' key will decrease space between words

- Pressing the 'r' key will increase space between words

-Pressing the 'h' key will randomize the color of the words

-Pressing the 'y' key will reset the color of the words

-Pressing the 'j' key will randomize the font of the words

-Pressing the 'u' key will reset the font of the words

-Pressing the 'k' key will randomize the font size of the words

-Pressing the 'i' key will reset the font size of the words

Below I have two images of my sketch at the end of the program. The top one is when everything is default. The one below is where all the variables have been randomized.

Here is a link to the zip file of the source code:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d62bgccs924c3d1/Visual_Poetry_Fortner.zip

Some lacking of the sketch is the variety of parts of speech. I only have the basic 8. So the sentences do not often flow well. Another big one is the lack of punctuation. I didn't consider it till closer to the end and basically ran out of time to try and find a way to make it work. Also I would have liked to have added more features to edit mode but again ran out of time.