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| The Waste Land | ||
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| Author(s): | Sai Sriskandarajah |  |
| Instructor: | O'Sullivan, Dan | |
| Class: | Intro to Comp Media | |
| URL: | http://www.saisriskandarajah.com/worksonpaper/flash/wasteland/ | |
| Documents: |
wasteland.txt(Plain Text)
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| Documents: |
code.txt(Plain Text)
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| Documents: | detail.jpg(JPEG) | |
| Keywords: | computational media, programming, processing, algorithmic art, 2D | |
| "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot, encoded into binary and displayed as a series of little black squares. | ||
| “The Waste Land” is the product of a program that encodes text as binary (using an arbitrary coding system) and represents the resulting code visually. Each of the tens of thousands of little squares in the image represents a 1 or a 0 – smaller squares are 0s, larger squares are1s; every five squares represents a character of the alphabet. Through this simple system, one of the masterworks of Western literature is both reduced and expanded, its meaning shifted as it blurs the line between symbolic/linguistic meaning and visual expression. The program was written in Processing. Images are exported as Adobe Illustrator files and printed manually on a large-format printer. | ||
| Background: | This piece is based on work I have done as a painter. In the past, the entire process, from selection of text through encoding and rendering with ink on paper or paint on canvas, was carried out by hand. Typically, a piece consisting of ten lines of verse took as long as 40 hours to create. The text-encoding program represents my first attempt to pass some of the work along to a computer, and in so doing to allow for generation of these code works on a much larger scale. | |
| Technical System Description: | The finished product has no set dimensions; the only requirement is that it should be printed and hung on a wall. If the piece is presented in poster format (anywhere from 2ft x3ft to about 4ft x 8ft), it may be framed for display. It may also be presented in a long, narrow format, like a tickertape, which may be displayed horizontally or vertically. | |