5-in-5 Day 4

sean
sean
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

For Day 4 of 5-in-5 I returned to a similar theme to Day 2: interpreting texts in unintended ways and using it as coded output. For today I took three poems by Mao Zedong (from 1925, 1935, and 1956) as starting data, converted the text to hexadecimal format, and split that output into lines 6 characters long to use as hex color data in a sketch using HTML Canvas.

I chose to display this manipulated output in the most straightforward way possible: as blocks of color that filled up a single page. This meant changing the size of the blocks depending on the length of the poem. I also decided to brighten and saturate the colors for aesthetic purposes, as the original manipulated data was very dull and dark. Here are the final three pieces:

Changsha (1925)
Loushan Pass (1935)
Swimming (1956)

Like Day 2, these works focus on ideas of irreversibleness. From these stills it would be possible to reverse engineer the text, though it would be highly tedious.

By using these three poems by Mao I wanted to ask questions of the relationship between revolution and art, specifically is there a level of abstraction at which the revolutionary context is stripped from the art. For example, in Swimming Mao clearly alludes to the coming Great Leap Forward:

Great plans are afoot:
A bridge will fly to span the north and south,
Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare;
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain goddess if she is still there
Will marvel at a world so changed.

In the piece I constructed based on this text, however, there’s no possibility that a person would guess at this revolutionary context just by looking at the generated art. Does this mean that the context is stripped, even though the piece was made from these words?

The code for this project can be found here.

Written by

sean

im the guy who sucks. plus i got depression. http://twotabsofacid.com

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