Digital Studies 301A: Creative Coding
Fall 2018
The time has come to end the semester and this class, but the learning and interest will never stop. Our last task was to create a portfolio of 4 projects we wanted to improve on, so I decided on my Twitter Bot, my Poetry Remix, my Screensaver, and my Glitch art.
Originally, my Twitter Bot was a mix of 3 different poems, a Robert Frost poem, a Sonnet by Shakespeare, and lines from the Iliad.
To switch it up and improve my bot, I took out the sonnet and replaced it with lyrics from my favorite country song, Sweet Thing by Keith Urban, and I took out the image. So now the Tweet shows thus:
I really like the new outcome, it was old and mellow before, but now it has a new and fun upbeat to it. See my Twitter Bot! It was the first project introduced to me and I loved it instantly, I had a lot of fun playing with texts and finding ways to creatively mix them.
The next project I wanted to improve on is my Glitch art. I had an animal theme going on, but I wanted to see how it would look with florals.
To make the Glitch art, we were shown 3 different ways.
- “Databending. Use software designed for something else to mess with image files. Audacity, WordPad, and TextEdit are popular options.
- Pixel sorting. Use a Python module to rearrange the pixels of an image according to different criteria to produce a surreal effect.
- Datamoshing. Manipulating structural data in media files, especially video, to produce interesting and often disturbing alternatives.”
I mainly used a hex editor and some of Audacity to glitch the images, but I wanted to explore more possibilities with the hex editor. So I choose 2 images of flowers and here are my results:
I love the results. Glitch art was my favorite project because we made something new and very visually appealing. Going into editing, I knew that the code read from top to bottom, so I started moving code from the top to get a style and theme, which I was able to achieve. I really liked how this project gave me a surprise in the possible tools used to create the art, who knew an audio editor could create images!
The next project I wanted to improve was my Poetry Remix project, where we had to write code that transformed text and output it as poetry. My original code printed an adjective and a noun from Grimm’s Fairytales:
Example:
second tree
wild hatchet
scarlet revenge
old ‘
So I added a verb to be printed and this was the new result:
sleep way high
go kingdom healthy
amuse cook red
see corner angry
I am very pleased with the out put and working with texts is fun. And poetry does not have to be extravagant words or phrases, it can be simple and open to anyone’s interpretation. Learning this project helped my python skills immensely.
The last project I wanted to work on was my novel for National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo). Our novel had to generate at least 50,000 words and mine generates about twice as much. I combined two different stories from Project Gutenberg, which was Siddhartha and The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I was happy with it, but the novel was printing with random punctuation marks, which bothered me. I realized after helping someone else with their novel that I just had to put the function to make a new sentence in my if statement as well my for statement.
Such a simple fix, but the result made my happy nevertheless. Read my new novel!