Workshops in Creative Coding

Paula Carrascal

While you water my feet with blood - thousands of letters you will never read

https://vimeo.com/826294227

Introduction

This is a random poetry generator connected to a potentiometer through Arduino made from
a letter I did to an ex lover that synthesizes all the pain and anxiety I have been feeling for
the last couple of months.

Concept and background research

The project starts as a catarsis from and for myself and the emotions I have carried out on
this journey I’ve had with my inner consciousness and the detachment of past connections in
order to form a new connection with myself throughout the past six months I have been living
in a foreign country for the first time. Since I have been struggling with deep emotions, they
were my strongest inspiration throughout the project: living, understanding and getting them
out of my system was the motor for which I wanted to start this assignment in the first place.
The idea began with a scan I made from an envelope filled with poems and flowers and
covered in with my own hair in the shape of a heart that I took while I was on one of the
depressive episodes I’ve had within the last couple of months. I was not inspired to create
(or less begin with my final submissions) throughout the time that just went by but making
this set of scans made me think of a way in which I could implement this same concept and
adapt it to a
computational form.
At first I thought of
building a box and
connecting a stretch
sensor to Arduino
and gluing hair on it:
inside the box
would be the circuit
and the stretch
sensor would be
sticking out of the
wooden box so
every time you
pulled “the hair”
(stretch sensor) the random poetry in the middle of the screen would begin. Since I did not
found the motivation to follow this idea, I decided to use a potentiometer that would be the
one in charge of changing the poetry on the screen, so I did and catched its sigal using the
p5.serialport library.
As a matter of inspiration I used my own emotions from re-discovering myself inside this new
space that I’m occupying, as well as the learnings I have from the past seven months
coursing the Masters, in addition to the words that have always surrounded my life as a poet.
Even though it is not the most advanced project, I wanted to experiment linking both one of
my practices (wiriting) with the technical implementations I have learned throughout the
course in order to obtain a poetic and trascendental outcome, especially for myself.

Technical Implementation

At first the project was devised to make a communication between TouchOsc and Visual
Studio Code in order to generate a drawing with the frequency capturated through Protokol
but the idea did not took place due to the emotional place where I have been for the last
couple of months so I decided that I was going to develop a more personal project in order to
find the motivation within myself to carry it out. The initial idea was to have a string of hair
which had inside an stretch sensor connected to Arduino that communicated with the sketch
in NodeJs, as if the hair was the one “pulling the strings” of the random poetry generator for
it to create a new poem based on the sentence structure of the main poem written around
the new one. This idea could not be taken into place so I decided to control the sketch
through a potentiometer object so I could integrate both physical and computational forms in
order for the project to reference the knowledge I have obtained within the MA course. For
the resulting idea of my project, I end up not using NodeJs but the p5.serialport library of
p5.js, for which I had to install a programme called p5.serialcontrol, which read the signal
entering from the COM4 through Arduino and translating the data inside the sketch of my
project. I did not had to install any library in my console but only open the programme in my
computer in order for it to communicate with the sketch. I took reference for using this library
on the p5.js libraries and also got helped from a tutorial in a Github repo that is referenced at
the end of this text.
The decision to diagram the screen as I did was made since I wanted for the outcome to
look oversaturated in words as if you were reading a thousand poem. At the end, I thought
as a good idea to leave only the parts of the sentences of my poem (verbs, nouns,
connectors, etc) to deliver a metaphor within the project that has to do with the nonsense
relationships may carry out at the end of them: no matter how many promises or
declarations of love you have made throughout it, the majority of romantic relationships (or at
least in my case) always end making no sense because of the longing for a moment or
emotions that are not there anymore, since everything changes and people may take
another course. This is what I wanted to represent by taking only the parts of the sentences
of the poem I wrote, no matter how you try to organize them, it’ll end up forming a sentence
that does not makes sense.
Reflection and future development

Overall, the project had a good and the expected outcome in the end, despite the multiple
changes made over the initial idea. I could practice my skills
on communication between softwares, practice that I enjoy
doing, especially between a physical and a digital object. As
I took inspiration from a letter (physical object) to perform
my digital submission, it was an interesting idea linking
something physical to control the outcome of a digital one. I
was a little unhappy in the end because I could not make
use of my string of hair since it is significant for me and
gives more meaning to the whole concept of controlling the
random poetry through it because for me, that string of hair
is or was a part of me, as well a the person who inspired me
to make this set of poetry in the first place – it is the
connection that exist between me and that significant other.
In regards of future development I do wish to bring to light the first ideation I had for the
project: being able to print a box and attach to it the envelope with the letters I made, attach
to it as well a bunch of flowers that eventually will decompose as a nothing lasts forever
metaphor and finally, being able to connect the stretch-haired sensor in order for it to modify
the random words taken out from the original poem. If completed, this project would certainly
be part of an exhibition.
References:

Happy Coding
Daniel Schiffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQYsUjT-IBo
https://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/labs/labs-serial-communication/lab-serial-input-to-the-p5-js-ide/
https://github.com/p5-serial/p5.serialserver