I’ve used this assignment as an opportunity to continue my explorations of the writings of Virginia Woolf as transformed by digital mediums, as well as to better understand how to use a spectral system to create audio-responsive visuals.
I began by reviewing Jesse’s original shapes/ducks/text patch and reconstructing through the components of the PFFT~ one by one in order to understand how they work together toward being written into a matrix. I subsequently created a system outside of the PFFT~ subpatch which randomly pulls a series of lines from Woolf’s novels and renders them as 3D text to a jit.gl sequence.
The only extant recording of Woolf speaking about the identities of words activates the PFFT~ process, and the resulting signals control the scale of the text. The movement of the text uses Jesse’s original Positions subpatch, but filtered through a new matrix used to control the number of lines which appear at any given time.
At the top of her recording, Woolf says, “Words…are full of echoes, memories, associations…” and I aimed to create a visual experience which reflects this statement as an interplay between her own spoken and written words.
I spent some time altering various parameters – size of the matrices, size of the text, amount of time allotted to the trail, swapping the placement and scaling matrices, etc – in order to achieve different effects. Some examples of those experiments are below.
Here’s the recording of Virginia Woolf.