DAY 1/5 — SLIME
The Concept:
For my 5-in-5 project I decided to attempt to visualize texture, using Processing, without depicting an image of the texture itself. My main challenge for this task is avoiding depicting the stereotypes of a specific texture. Instead, my hopes are to come to understand the role of texture in my life: What feelings do certain textures evoke, how does one describe the sensation of touching it, where is it classically used, and do they trigger any of the other senses? By visualizing these textures, my primary goal is to begin to explore something that I suspect affects us more than we give credit to.
The second part of my concept explores the ways in which the perception of the “mood” of texture is subjective: how does the way I experience a texture differ from that of my friends? Each day of my 5-in-5 project I plan to ask a friend to give me a texture that they feel described their day. For example, day one uses the word ‘Slime’. My friend, Nina, was sick yesterday and she felt that ‘slime’ best describes her physical and mental state that day. I started the process of visualizing slime from her perspective. What does slime in relation to illness mean? Ultimately, my slime visualize came out a little more playful, and reminiscent of the old school Nickelodeon Slime Time, but it may not have gotten there without starting from her perspective.
Below is my documentation for today’s word — Slime.

In order to start off my brainstorm I tried to come up with adjectives that I used to describe slime in general. My initial thoughts were words like gooey, sticky, gross, slippery. Later came words that looked more closely at the overlap between slime and illness: words like undulating (to describe slime’s movement) and mysterious (who really knows where the slime in the bathroom comes from). I decided first to focus on a visualization that narrowed in on the word mysterious and undulating, including developing a color palette based on these two words.

Somehow the above didn’t feel quick “slimy” enough. After analyzing it for some time, I realized that in my first attempt, I was lacking the sheen the that I was looking for. Slime, to me, definitely needed to appear slimy, or slippery in some way. The background also felt like too much of a contrast, so I played around with the movement and the coloring a bit.

Somehow in my second attempt, I lost the original sheen I was looking for but started to move towards what I would describe as a bucket of worms, which felt like it was headed in the right direction. Though I initially felt good about the speed, I wondered if perhaps slimy meant “fast” to me. I decided to try to experiment with speed.

Experimenting with speed proved to be promising, but the speed of attempt 3 still felt too fast. I also stumbled upon a way to darken the tips of the undulations to create some depth, and realized that my waves were starting to look more and more worm-like, which, again, felt right to me.

My final attempt ended up with the sheen I was after and the right amount of squirm. I realized that my definition of slime did, in fact, relate to worms, but also felt reminiscent of germs, or amoeba, which may have been prompted by the original idea of illness. By creating a system in which my friend was the prompt for my texture-investigation, I was pushed outside of my boundaries for what a certain texture might mean. Overall, this felt like a solid attempt and I ended up creating something representative of the texture.
