kenfrederick: processing. color as language

processing. color as language

i have a huge interest in language, and the translation or transposition from language to language is fascinating. the "lost in translation" project http://tashian.com/multibabel/ is a good example of the changes language undergoes when translated back and forth between multiple languages.

but in the same vein as my processing. tonal visualization which is an experiment in translating music into graphics. this project is an attempt to translate words into color (or colors).

harnessing the tags of kuler and the content from everyones latest interest twitter. it simply pulls the latest tweet from twitter's public timeline every 2 minutes and then filters words less than two letters (i.e. a, an, I, of, is, it, etc.) cross referencing tags and text from kuler to determine the colors.

an example of what a typical tweet "RT @SwSatchidananda: 'Realize the never-changing, enjoy the ever-changing. Both are necessary.'" when it's distilled down to "RT the enjoy the Both are necessary.'" would look like in colors:

the code might be a bit sloppy, i initially planned to use the colorlib to grab data from kuler, but it didn't offer easy access to tags so i simply re-wrote my own class Kuler.pde (source below) to access and parse data from kuler. in order to access to twitter i'm using twitter4j but accessing it's structure is a pain (at least i think it is) so i wrote a class (FTwitte.java) that makes it easier to access twitter4j's methods.

my next version of this project is to use flickr and photo tags to translate tweets into photographs. in the end for both the color and photography apps i plan to add a way to toggle back and forth between words and color/imagery, to mimic the "telephone" nature of translation.

s = save a .png of current display
k = toggle circle/squares
t = toggle large/small text
up/down arrow keys = change size of circle/squares

grab the source kulerSprache_0_4.zip

Labels: experiment, processing