Saturday, October 1, 2011

Sentence Drawings - Faust's Monologue

As an analytical and visually oriented person, I have been interested in the relationship between data and art and data-driven design. It is in the last couple of days that I have studied the open source programming language Processing, a software developed by the MIT Media Lab to create images, animations and interactions. (There are some really cool projects on the site - ranging from music videos and graphic designs to video installations and visualization of pollution levels.)

And here is my first result - two images - created today:

Faust de ImageFaust en Image

Processing, a set on Flickr.

Inspired by the work of the London-based designer Stefanie Posavec, these drawings are based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy. One line is drawn for each sentence of Faust's monologue (first chapter). The length of each line is depending on the number of words per sentence. The first line is drawn to the right. After a line is drawn, or in other words the sentence is complete, the next line is drawn in a 90 degree right angle creating a drawing depicting the writing style. In the comparison of the two drawings one can easily identify differences in writing style between the two languages (German, English).

More to come...

(The images have been created using Processing, Google Docs, Adobe Reader, MS Notepad and MS Paint.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Awesome stuff, I will try Processing asap! I ll feed it some of Thomas Mann's and Thomas Bernhard's prose, and be comparing it to Hemingway. It also inspires my neuroticism to end every piece of text I am writing from now on with a row of short sentences, as a personal trademakr, just in case anyone will ever analysze my stuff, and have one very long sentence right before the end. I'll do it. My signature. Brilliant. Yes.