Fluxus/Midterm

After viewing a few of the fluxus films, i found myself struggling to be captured or connected to these works of art. obviously minimalistic in intention but big in personal meaning for the individual creator, these experimental films were certainly unique and had their impact on the time. The film that I watched that was most interesting to me was George Maciunas' - Artype, featuring no more than patterns of monochromatic dots and lines. It begins with a while dot, varying rapidly in luminance against a black background. Suddenly, the colors are reversed, with the dot appearing in various shades of black against a white background. All the while, the camera is jerking around, giving the dot the appearance that it is shaking within a constrained area of the image. Then, numerous dots appear on the screen and appear to have upward motion, going at speeds fast enough they create a blur of almost horizontal lines. They then morph in size to create a visual field that is hypnotizing. Changing in size and intensity, they project different patterns of
circles, squares, and triangles, changing the image quickly from a mostly black image to a white one. After a while, the commotion of the quickly changing shapes gives way to white horizontal lines moving up and down against a black background. First they appear to move upward on the screen, and then downward, changing slightly in thickness. They then begin to move faster, at a pace that the images becomes a grey color, and reflects the appearance of static--of a picture not coming in clearly. Then, as the movement of the lines reach peak speed and intensity, they flip in orientation, now appearing to us as vertical. They have also bent, now appearind as curved lines with multiple bends, similar to a helix. The curved lines swim back and forth rapidly, sometimes parallel to eachother, sometimes overlapping, before the screen goes to black. Similar to static coming through on a bad television signal, portrayed as art it really drives home his point that "anything is art and anyone can do it."

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For the midterm project, I want to begin exploring a project on data visualization. The project named Synesketch, is the "web's first open-source textual emotion recognition and visualization engine," was created in 2008.

I hope to spend some time learning what this is all about, and seeing what kind of pieces result from my own writing. How the artwork will come out based on the emotional senses of my writing.

Synesketch can be used in many ways, including as a tool for visual artists and designers.

"Synesketch is a set of JAVA based APIs for analyzing and plotting emotions from input text. The visualization you are seeing above is called Hooloovoo, named after the super-intelligent shade of color blue from the Hitchhiker’s guide to galaxy, is essentially a square pie chart with colors based on the emotions contained in the text."

"The emotional parameters are based on a WordNet-based lexicon of words with their general & specific emotional weights, for the emotion types happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise. the visualization is based on a generative painting system of imaginary colliding particles. colors & shapes of these patterns depend on the type and intensity of interpreted textual emotions."

One of my varied interests is information graphics and design. I don't know much about coding at all, but want to see the underlying techniques for creating visually appealing graphics that convey information in a way that text alone cannot accomplish.