The Nonsense Stuff of It-Full Dome Animation

The ongoing project Finding Poetry challenges the relationship between meaning and form by employing data visualization methods to obfuscate -- rather than clarify -- information. The animation The Nonsense Stuff of It are based on a poem by Robert Browning. Using a web crawler written for the project by Nolan Brubaker, we began a search for each poem at gawker.com and wandered, link by link, through the Internet until we found each word in the poem within texts published by others on blogs and websites. These words are represented in the animations using an algorithm that draws each word as a radial pattern defined by the number of links on the page where each word is found, the number of attempts the web crawler made to find the word, and the geographical distance between the servers where each website is hosted. These shapes change and grow as each word is presented in sequence.

The works by Elson and Browning both describe the temptation and perils associated with the quest for knowledge. However, they are informed by different backgrounds: one is a late twentieth-century physicist, and the other a nineteenth century poet. Each animation is designed to reflect some of the character of the original works while it also charts the search for these poems in cyberspace.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Art
• poetry
• robert browning
• visualization
• processing