Poetry on the Road
is an international literature
festival which is held every year in Bremen,
Germany. Since 2002 I am commisioned to design a
visual theme for the festival. While the theme
itself is changing, the underlying idea for the
visuals is always the same: All graphics are
generated by a computer program that turns texts
into images. So every image is the direct
representation of a specific text. The design and
the development process are a collaboration with
the design agency
jung und pfeffer.
(Now one/one)
)
)
Medium:
Print
Year:
2008
Client:
Poetry on the Road
Team:
Friederike Lambers, Boris Müller, Florian Pfeffer
I am still very fond of one of my oldest graphic experiments - the Fast Faust poster. So in 2008, I took up the basic concept behind the poster and used it for VisualPoetry08.
Visually, Faust and Poetry08 look quite different. However, conceptually they are quite close. The application sorts scales all words in a poem based on their frequency in the text and places them on a line. The most frequent words are therefore relatively large and placed on the left hand side of the line.
However, while the Fast Faust poster is based on the entire Faust by Goethe, VisualPoetry08 treats every poem seperatly. Each word sequence is stacked on the previous one. So it is possible to compare the word frequencies.
So in a second step, all words that appear in several poems are connected by a red line. The width of the line is related to the length of the word in the regarding sequence. Words that only appear once are marked with an »X«.
As usual, I have created an interactive demonstrator that enables you to play with this concept. However, as it takes a while to create a critical mass of text, you don't start with a blank screen but with some of my favourite german poems. (Hint: Brecht and Fontane).
Impressum
