Allison Parrish @aparrish@friend.camp
- Home page
- https://www.decontextualize.com/
Poet, programmer, game designer, computational creativity researcher. Assistant Arts Professor at NYU ITP. she/her
Joined Mar 2019
I've been posting source code and notes for my class on computer-generated concrete poetry and asemic writing here: https://github.com/aparrish/material-of-language/
example from today's class: Johanna Drucker quote + Hershey font + simplex noise
using uniform noise makes them a bit more boxy, adding a bit of shear makes them look vaguely italic. starting to look like a wedding invitation now, for better or worse
results of catmull-rom splines drawn through centroids of a KMeans clustering model fit on a few hundred random points from a normal distribution. produces some pleasing forms imo
it's amazing how just a little bit of repetition and structure can make something look more like "writing." asemic glyphs generated from curve-fit polylines with points sampled from a uniform distribution, on the right with an added baseline stroke, on the left without
this is a first for me: I actually managed to use one of those promotional swag bags enough to wear it out. sucks 'cause I really liked this bag :(
a fun thing you can do with catmull-rom splines is overshoot the "tightness" parameter and make progressively more loop-de-loop forms—here each line has a higher tightness parameter than the previous one (starting at -0.5)
"cursive" from concatenating catmull-rom splines that connect points randomly placed on 3x3 grids, drawing from a fixed "alphabet" of glyphs
more computational asemic wip: catmull-rom splines connecting points of concentric polygons (with some brushstroke effects applied to the resulting paths)
hmm, this co–star sun in opposition chart sorta looks like a smiling sloth tilting its head to the left
another afternoon study with the axidraw: two-tone asemic glyphs with brush pens. (glyphs are generated by connecting points sampled from a normal distribution with catmull-rom splines.) discovered you can get surprisingly expressive brush strokes by setting the pen_delay_down and pen_delay_up parameters to negative values, so it starts moving vertically before it's done moving horizontally. (actually brush pens are 100% unusable *unless* you do this)
another attempt (just a preview, not plotted)—again, applying simplex noise to the x/y coordinates of the vectors in the text. each layer passes a slightly different parameter to the z dimension of the simplex noise. will probably stop by the art supply store tomorrow and buy one of those really, really fine micron pens
actually not happy with any aspect of this, haha, but that's what makes a successful prototype. I'm using simplex noise to modify the shapes, but I jacked up the granularity (?) because the "smoother" version (attached) feels a bit too... I dunno, design-ey? plus the idea of layers of illegible text "merging" to form legible text feels too "magic eye" for my taste. plus this was extremely the wrong pen for this. enh, I'll figure it out
work in progress, drawing layers of noisy hershey text. quote is from Johanna Drucker's _The Visible Word_
ANYWAY, what I was actually trying to make—draft version from earlier today when I was trying out (unsuccessfully to my eye) using a brush pen; later version (after I fixed the DPI bug) using the micron 08 on darker paper
always vaguely hilarious when you do something weird with text and html/css and the text is still selectable and copy/paste-able
- Home page
- https://www.decontextualize.com/
Poet, programmer, game designer, computational creativity researcher. Assistant Arts Professor at NYU ITP. she/her
Joined Mar 2019
