A conceptual publisher that produces reading objects, physical representations of literature which suggest new modes of comprehension. Reading objects can be understood as cognitive artworks and tools for reflection and remembrance of a piece of literature.

Reading Material

Material approaches literature as a stimulus for art. Collaborating with a consortium of readers and writers, Material resynthesizes literary works by analyzing their narrative structures and producing computationally-crafted design object that represent them. By merging the unique literary perspective of a selected reader with a thoughtful computational algorithm and design system, each design object (reading material) offers it's viewer an alternate means of understanding and remembering (reading) a text.

Pamphlet

Reading material comes with an accompanying pamphlet that describes the perspective of the reader and the computational design approach used to produce the object.

INCEPTION & PROTOTYPE

I built a proof of concept at the hackathon at Cooper Union in 2015 with collaborator Zak Hap. The software computed metrics on the parts of speech usage in a text over time and produced a three-dimensional object that represented the data. The text analysis and genertive algorithm was implemented in Processing, which piped MEL commands to Autodesk Maya to generate the shape in real-time using Processing's Network library.

Awards

We presented our software as finalists and won two awards (totaling $1000): 'Most Technical Hack' and 'Best Use of 3D in a Web Application' awarded by Autodesk.

The Waves

I worked with music technologist and mathemetician Jake Araujo-Simon↗︎ to explore his unique perspective on Virginia Woolfe's novel "The Waves".

Reading

Jake Araujo-Simon described his reading of the novel beautifully in both writing and conversation, colored by his own idiosyncratic language. This reading framed the subsequent explorations of the text data and visual system.

I extracted metrics from the text that focused on the relevance of each character in particular sections of the novel to further guide the design the process.

Character Relationship Graphs

We developed a method to extract character relationships by analyzing each character's dialogue in a portion of the text and generate weighted edges between all characaters based on their narrative proximity.

Dimensionality Reduction

We mapped these graphs to Euclidean spacing using Laplacian Eigenmaps to reduce the dimensionality of the graphs/matrices.

Result Set

The result is a series of 2D coordinates for each character that encodes the closeness or distance between that character and all other characters in a given portion of text.

Form

I brought these coordinates into Rhinoceros and wrote a script that interpolates between their locations for each character. Each ribbon represents a character and the ways they braid over time represents their relationships as the narrative progresses.

The resulting object can be read chronologically, each moment representing the orientation of the characters social relationship in the plot.