<aside> ⚠️ [CW: EXPLICIT SEXUAL IMAGERY + TEXT]
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TIMELINE:
[OCT 2022] — 2 weeks
TEAM:
solo (developed with many conversations with different people)
METHODS:
creative coding; publication design; illustration — weaving in and out of softwares, using as many free, open-source design tools as possible
THEMES:
SPACE (including fuzzy boundaries between physical and digital space; digital representations of the erotic), INTERACTION; HUMOUR (porn as outlandish imaginative worldbuilding)
A love letter to Rambooks [a secondhand porn bookstore in London] and the hilarious, imaginative worldbuilding possibilities of porn. I translated a physical vintage porn mag into a database in Python and wrote 12 algorithms to generate blackout poetry based on the text in the magazine. I then translated the code output (the poems) back into a physical publication, this time a connect-the-dots colouring book where the way I created illustrations around the shapes of the poems subverted the cishet white male gaze of the original porn mag.
<aside> 👉🏻 NAVIGATOR:
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Interactive search algorithm mirroring the futility of searching on the busy phone sex ad catalogue. I highlighted the irony of a digital search producing a useless output (the terminal asks “what are you trying to reach?” over and over until the user enters a word in the database — upon which it spits out the first index this word occurs in the database.) Writing this algorithm was striking to me as the algorithm itself was a Programming 101 algorithm but it produced interesting and meaningful results — creative coding does not have to be technically complex!
A Eureka moment — “playing” the computer: the blackout poetry I wrote algorithms to generate are highly reliant on their shapes for meaning. This algorithm randomly generates spacing such that every time the reader loads the poem it will be different, and the shape of the poem changes as the reader changes the size of the program window. The screen itself is an important part of the artwork.
