Art from Code: Hole in the Sky

Already having been behind in Art from Code, I realized that my outlook towards this assignment stipulated an effective strategy. After talking with some people, I decided to try to capture a poem that I had already written in the form of a collage. Poetry naturally contains a lot of contradictory and sometimes overlapping images, motifs, and concepts. I first started by simply gathering all my images, taking suggestions from my poem, and putting them down on a canvas.

Screen Shot 2017-10-07 at 10.56.52 PM
Using push(), pop(), and translate() to simply get images down on the canvas.

I then moved some of the images around to be more compositionally pleasing, and tried to incorporate more of the requirements to the prompt by utilizing the rotate methods and also starting to add text from the poem – focusing on reiterating the central symbols. The translate method was extremely useful in helping me work through revisions as I changed the placement of images.

adding rotation
adding rotation and text from the poem

After adding some more text, I began to use the arrow shown in Chapter 3 of Make as it is an example of a vertex drawing.

adding arrows
adding arrows

I quickly realized that arrows were not actually what I wanted. When I think of collage, or my experiences with collage, I am reminded heavily of using tape. So I decided to make several ‘tape’ pieces. But I think playing with the alpha channel of each of these pieces of tape was fun. The tape elements remain fixed in the canvas, whereas the three images behind it are animated to center-rotate. I think the fact that these pieces of tape remain fixed is a cool reference to antiquated practices of collage.

pieces of tape
pieces of tape

I added the sound elements of: waves breaking, the apollo moon landing, and a dog howling. I also applied the collage idea to my usage of sound, by having the sounds all play at once, but at different relative volumes, if the mouse is clicked. Poems are sort of like dreams or are a literary method where several related images are interwoven. I think collage might conceptually allow something similar to happen.

For reference, the inspirational poem can be found here.

In retrospect, I think I would have liked to learn how to resize images within the p5.js library itself, if possible. Making a collage is difficult; it is hard to make the images cohere or speak to one another. My final result does not satiate my own expectations. While it contains vector graphics, sound, rotation, animated rotation, text, colors (though only within a contained palette), and fonts, this piece seems still too disorganized for me. And I am afraid that it may not be very accessible to others.

Author: Shreeda Segan