// Idea

I started with trying to do something with shader, but I found it really difficult to understand in 1 week given the context that I had 0 experience with coding, so I gave up... I literally spent hours watching tutorials and reading the texts about shaders but I found it too difficult for me... So I shift gear from that to try to construct something using texts. I love Borges’ works and I think what we did in our class about analyzing texts, parsing texts into individual words and recombine them matches a lot with Borges’ (and also Calvino’s) idea about narratives and infinity. Thus I wanted to create a piece that communicates the idea of visualizing non-teleological sense of time and space. In Borges’ novels, he used the garden of forking paths as a metaphor for this world with bifurcating time and spaces where the present, past and future intertwines with each other. What I tried to do is to parse the words from his novel into individual words, recombining them in a non-teleological, chaotic form that each word is disconnected from each other verbally and linguistically, yet jumbles together in a larger visualized labyrinth. 

//Process

I started from displaying words in random locations. Thus instead of calling the words we split from the string as DOM objects, I called them as p5 objects so it is easier to define their positions. Here is how it looks like from the very beginning:
I still tried to add shaders to make distorted texts but didn’t manage to do so. Yet, I came up with another idea of reorganizing each parsed words into random locations and visualize another concrete image. This thus combines what we did in the image pixelation with what we did about text. I first tried with a random image I created before:


Yet, since the words are too many and it will eventually crash the program if I have the increment really small, I decided to work with some more concrete images. I tried with a bunch of images like the labyrinth, Chinese traditional painting of gardens and mountains, and the maze to refer to what Borges’ is discussing in his novel signifying the intersecting time and space. However, none of these images can be displayed in recognizeable formats due to their level of abstraction. I have to work with concrete images like portraits. So I compromised with displaying Borges’ portrait using the texts, seeing the word objects called from the array as pixels.

I then thought about more interectivity in terms of displaying words. So I want to create a slider which participants can slide through to change the fonts. I created another file to test with and applied it to the final code.

I also tried to display the words that appear most frequently in the text using Markov chain. However, it was constantly displaying “the”, which I found not so interesting thus I removed “the” from the string and found out it was displaying “is” and “in”, which relates more to time and space linguistically? Yet, I didn’t manage to remove the words but only remove the letters so I gave up with that...

I tried with displaying borges’ portrait in colors but I don’t like it aestheically wise so I choose to display it as an inverted black and white image instead.
Here is the ultimate overview:


what I relates Borges’ work and my visualization of it to code is the idea of the level of control and agency that we have in this nested matrix of precompositions. For programming, everything remains in the system or in the matrix but still there is a certain random level of freedom and control that we as programmers has to analyze things and display them with aesthetically pleasing visuals. And I think this is also what Borges’ is leading us to in his bifurcating paths of time and space: it is our choice to select which path or paths we are going to.