Literary License Blog

The Art of Getting Lost: Mapping, Walking and Art

April 9, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization

“The point of my work is my own physical engagement with the world in different ways, whether it’s walking, or making fingerprints, or throwing stones.” – Richard Long

In August of last year, I spent a week solo hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Near the end of my trip, I hiked 5 miles of boulder fields completely cloaked in fog. I felt as though a nomadic explorer, lost in some other-world because all I could see at any point in time was a wall of grey mist that occasionally parted to reveal a short glimpse of the trail, arm’s length in reach.

I have no idea what I hiked through that day, I imagine the experience is similar to Gianni Motti’s 6-hour long walk through the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile long underground particle accelerator tunnel:

“After 2 kilometers, I lost all notions of time and space. I don’t remember anything, I was elsewhere.” – Gianni Motti

Walking, it turns out, is beautiful.

→ Read more

Data Art: Psychogeography, and Walking as An Art Form

April 1, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization

“The world cannot be recorded, it can only be remade.”
-Walking and Mapping by Karen O’Rourke

While reviewing the readings for Data Art this past week, I was surprised to find myself feeling incredibly inspired. Many of the examples Jer Thorp showed in class included work I had seen before. Midway through the readings, I had a sudden, random thought (and idea!) What if I walked the streets of Manhattan in order to deliberately write a message on the city grid? What would I say that would be so important (or perhaps, not important at all?) Or, what if I just drew a deliberate pattern, my trail a continuous line drawing. Was there a point to such an exercise?

When I initially had this idea, I wasn’t sure if it was very good as I couldn’t explain in concrete terms why I wanted to undertake it. But when I shared the idea with fellow ITP-ers, everyone seemed to just instantly “get” the concept. It was exciting then to validate my idea, and discover a long history of walking as an art form, in Karen O’Rourke’s Walking and Mapping.

Mapping is a way to locate ourselves, and our situation in the world, and act upon it. Walking is a personal yet universal experience. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that artists have long played with the concept of walking as an art form.

Traverse Me, Jeremy Wood, continuous GPS drawing

The first chapter explores “psychogeography” as an alternative way of reading the city. Psychogeographers decode urban space by moving through it in unexpected ways. Alternative ways of walking through a city are an attempt to de-familiarize one’s self to one’s environment:

“The stumbling block for people who are familiar with an area is a selective gaze that ignores everything but what is necessary for the task at hand. We see only what we expect to see.”
- Mapping and Walking, Karen O’Rourke

The Situationists, on the other hand, briefly embraced the concept of experiencing a city by “drifting” through it without aim. → Read more

Propaganda Poetry

March 27, 2014 by michellechandra in Python

It’s time to write a program to make a poem! I decided to make propaganda poetry for Reading and Writing Electronic Text. Hopefully very bad propaganda poetry.

I dug up some books from the library and compiled a text file with war slogans from World War Two posters (British and American.) I also created a text file with headlines from The Economist (always mysteriously poetic!) and threw in my corporate mottos to the mix for good measure.

I think the results are actually pretty good for being fairly nonsensical. Here are my favorite poems that were generated. (You can find the code for the program at the end of this post.)

Poem One
Relearning old lessons
we trust
All that glitters is
kill

This is the enemy.

Keep that lumber coming!
Is your trip necessary?
Grow vitamins at your kitchen door.

Just a good afternoon’s
Bad ventilation ruins ammunition.

Poem Two
Buy victory bonds. Invest.
Come into the factories.
United we are strong.
Do it! Keep ‘em firing!

The daily diary of
neighbor, State Farm is there

A few careless words
If you are bombed

→ Read more

ITP ListServ Visualization: Getting My Gmail Data Using Python Gmail Library

March 18, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, Python

Today I figured out how to use this Gmail Python Library to fetch Gmail data for my ITP listserv visualization. First up, I installed the Gmail Python library by cloning the GitHub repo to a folder on my local computer.


git clone git://github.com/charlierguo/gmail.git

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git clone git://github.com/charlierguo/gmail.git

In Terminal, I changed directories so I was in the directory where I saved the library.


cd /Users/michellechandra/rwet/gmail

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cd /Users/michellechandra/rwet/gmail

I then installed the GMail Python library:


python setup.py

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python setup.py

And opened the Python Interpreter in Terminal:


python

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python

and ran these commands to log-in to my Gmail Account:


import gmail

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import gmail


g = gmail.login('username'. 'password')

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g = gmail.login('username'. 'password')

This command accesses messages labeled “ITP” in my Inbox: → Read more

Data Representation: ITP ListServ Visualization

March 18, 2014 by michellechandra in Data Visualization, Python

I am tackling what at times feels like a herculean Data Representation project, although on paper it sounds easy: visualize the connections between folks who use the ITP student listserv. In 2007, Joshua Knowles did just that.

This post is about how to not tackle this project.

For my first attempt at getting my gmail data, I ran this Python script and downloaded 6,126 emails (as separate text files) sent to the ITP listserv from Sept 5, 2013-Present. Luckily, Gmail has been archiving these emails for me in a separate folder in my Inbox (plus one for me!) I then attempted to adapt one of Dan O’Sullivan’s Gmail Word Count Processing sketches in order to loop through each text file, grab the From and Subject line and write to a CSV file. This turns out to be exactly the kind of sketch that crashes Processing. It’s just too much data for Processing + my computer to manage given I do not need each email (and all of that data including attachments) for this project. → Read more

Collapsing Time and Memory with Instacollage

March 14, 2014 by michellechandra in Creative Process, Photography, Processing

For Recurring Concepts in Art, Joelle and I are taking my Instacollages and remaking them without technology. The process of deconstructing my original project has forced me several times over to reflect on the motivations and process that led to Instacollage.

Joelle found this great quote which sums up collage and juxtaposition quite nicely:

“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.” Johann Goethe

Instacollage

One of the things you learn as photographer is that there is a process that happens by which we become familiar with our surroundings to the point we stop “seeing.”

→ Read more

Ideate, and Repeat

March 14, 2014 by michellechandra in Creative Process

“Before you have focused your thoughts you are all over the place, because you are searching. You are feeling. You are looking for things. You do not know what you are doing. You are lost. You are in a maze. So thinking is number one in the design process. The design is the product of your thinking.”
-Paul Rand