Poetry on the Road 2006
In 2006, our concept for the generative design of the literature festival »Poetry on the Road« is based on a very old concept of encoding text. We assigned a numerical value to every letter of the alphabet. Adding the values of all letters, one gets a number that represents the overall word. (For example, the number 99 represents the word »poetry«.)
Using this system, an entire poem could be arranged on a circular path. The diameter of the circle is based on the length of the poem. So you can see the short poems in the centre of the poster, while the longer ones form the outer circles.
Red rings on the circular path represent a number. As many different words can share the same number (»poetry« shares the 99 with words like »thought« and »letters«), most rings represents different words. The thickness of the ring depends on the amount of words that share the same number. Finally, gray lines connect the words of the poem in their original sequence. So solid lines represent repetitive patterns in the poem.
Like in the years before, the computer program was not only used to generate the image for the poster. It was also used for brochures and the cover of the book that accompanies each festival. Furthermore, the program was used to generate the divider pages in the book. So the poems of each wirter are introduced by an abstract visual representation of themselves.
The best way to understand the overall concept is probably to explore the interactive demonstrator.
