Week 7: Midpoint Musings

Has it really only been seven weeks? Good heavens. The time has been flying by, and this course rockets along, I’ll confess its been more than a bumpy ride. Each week it seems like I have to re-teach myself every concept we’ve played with up until now, as if I’m trapped in a draw loop that starts over every seven days. How can I internalize these lessons? It seems simple: balls bouncing, backgrounds changing color, etc— but the logic of all this eludes me. Last week was not my finest moment, and I regret having been at a loss for words, a rare occurrence for me. I’m a broken record.

I think part of the challenge for me has been that since this introduction has been graphics-based, I’m already out of depth. I am a storyteller, a writer of poetry and fiction, I know three spoken languages and two dead ones. Languages are rule-based, communicative, verbal, sonic, and aural systems that mediate our relationships to information, other people, and ourselves. Translating one language I don’t understand (javascript) into another that I have no education in, graphics-oriented pictorial space, hasn’t been the right inroad into coding for me and my learning style. The codecademy javascript course as well as other resources for js tutorials have been a saving grace, as they contextualize it against the english language and simple arithmetic.

Up until now, I’ve just been grateful if something works. Understanding and articulating the how and why will just have to wait. For now.

I’m excited to be moving into the next units, and hope to advance some playful ideas for storytelling and interaction into coding through p5. How can I use it textually? Poetically? Narratively? Can I animate sprites to enact a scene from a Shakespearean tragedy? Can I turn gestures into music? Generative composition?

For my P.Comp midterm, I attempted a sketch that displayed an array of images and played various musical phrases we uploaded into it. A magnetic spider, when placed at different points on a lasercut acrylic cobweb rigged with reed switches, would trigger these sights and sounds to recount the ancient myth of Arachne, the etiological tale for the origin of spiders. The project has its flaws, but that is definitely the kind of application I envision using computation toward.

Just because I’m a little lost doesn’t make this a lost cause. Here’s to looking ahead.