to... (drumroll)
gertrude stein's tender buttons is famously believed to be an exercise in sound over sense, and meaning through repetition. i graphed her words by their grammatical parts of speech to see, visually, the repetitive structure of her syntax. the poems are graphed using a system constructed to maximize readability from left to right while the y-axis is organized top to bottom as follows:
articles
adjectives
nouns
conjunctions
prepositions
pronouns
verbs
adverbs
this structure i could convert into do re mi scales, apply to a musical key, and in so doing, produce the music of stein's poetry. a music box come to life!
that! my first ever after-effects trick. hopefully the first of many in a series of ever-increasing impressiveness, complexity, and technique.
as for an obligatory "what did you learn at school today, sweetie?" address: over the course of this project, i have gone from opening after effects once or twice by accident and panicking when i saw its icon bouncing on my dock to being able to actually do a handful of things in it with some level of accuracy and understanding! i've also really experienced for one of the first times how well a legitimate concept can carry you through an execution without as much waffling as when you're less sold on your own idea, which itself was a lesson about a new way to generate a concept: what kind of information can i extract from this source? through what new system can i look at this information? what, then, can i do with that information in the system? i would love to think gertrude stein, with her highly, dazzlingly combined analytical and instinctual creative method would be intrigued.
