This project began as an idea to create a piece of abstracted, generative art from data. As an multimodal artist a driver for my work is to make the unheard heard and the unseen seen. This piece of abstract visual sound art uses text as both composition and brush. Within the Processing IDE (integrated development environment) I have parsed a piece of writing about unresolved rape cases in New Zealand using the Java programming language to create an image and an evolving composition with words. Unresolved |... can be classified as creative coding, generative abstract art. Picasso (qtd. In Herschel) once said “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” While my piece definitely starts with something I use the method of abstraction to not remove reality but to highlight it.
I began this piece as a way to research and highlight the abuse of women within society. The visual element if this work takes the words of a New Zealand Herald article from May 3rd, 2018 titled Unresolved: Why New Zealand rape victims are being left in limbo. The words are “read” in the Java program of an IntDict object that assigns each word a value. The dictionary first looks for “junk” words (the, an, and, be, it etc) and removes them. Each word is then mapped to a pixel position of the laptop webcam. Words fill the screen and form the image of the viewers face, font size decreases as more words are read into the image.
The sound element of the piece is also derived from the words. A MIDI class object was programmed to use the word value pairs counted with the IntDict. These values where mapped to MIDI note on messages and sent to three instruments in Ableton Live. The constant word count gives the composition a rhythm and generative evolution through time. The instruments chosen add specific elements, a mini Moog emulator with sweeping modulated triangle oscillators. A Moog modular emulator is the second instrument and is patched to produce an arpeggiated sequence. The third instrument is a FM8 synthesiser with the pitch transposed up 13 semitones.
As each word is counted a MIDI note on is sent, these where mapped to generate a random value and sent on MIDI channel 1 to the first instrument. A second set of values was sent to MIDI channel 2 and the second instrument according to each time the word sex was counted. The third instrument received all messages. The results are rising driving and rhythmic, as the complexity of the image increases with more words onscreen so the sound element intensifies.
Artist Laurie Anderson said, “My job is to make images and leave the decision- making and conclusion-drawing to other people”. This underscores my motivation to use data as a medium or parameter for my work. The importance of this work for me is the give voice to the unheard, to make the invisible visible. Through creative abstraction and methods of visualisation and sonification, the result is a work of generative art that seeks to uncover meaning not necessarily implicit in the raw data and words.