RWET, Assignment 1
I’d been filing away text ideas all week long. I thought I wanted to work off of a poem, but as I was going through the python exercises I’d thought it would be more interesting to take a longer text and condense to only a few words; just use the raw language and reconfingure it. I guess that’s what the class is, right?
I love space. I thought I wanted to be an astronomer at one point. I was super psyched about the latest news proving Einstein’s theory of relativity.
I was on tumblr and kept seeing this post:
…and I started reading it like a poem.
I realized, I’ve never actually looked at the Theory of Relativity text and got curious. It’s fairly dense but had some interesting words, such as infiniteness and Euclidean. I chose to use Chapter 31: The Possibility of a “Finite” and Yet “Unbounded” Universe, which was quite poetic as it was theoretical.
For my python program I wanted to play with condensing the text in a way that would lead to unexpected contractions and creative possibilities. I recalled the example that pulled and combined the first four characters and the last four characters of a line. I played around with a few variations, settling on 10 characters from the beginning and end. The result was not only a shortened text, but actually the creation of new words in the center. Considering this came out of the discovery of how black holes merge, I thought this result was quite appropriate.
Here’s a selection of some of the lines:
In the firnal space.
Flat beingn a plane.
For them neir plane.
In particution XXIV.
In contras infinite.
….
It is finino bounds.
It may be space.”
It can be ch other).
An ellipti symmetry.
It followsnceivable.
From amongquivalent.
I like that the words sound almost like a form of Middle English, or Latin.
Doing this process reminded me of the sound glitching I’ve played around with recently, where it’s a question of restraint and simplicity. It feels counterintuitive to write a simple piece of code but have beautiful language emerge. Like more effort should have happened. Or more thought. I feel like I cheated. But I like the result.