11:45
Boris Müller: Poetry on the Road
Boris Müller is a computational designer and educator based in Berlin. His work combines an analytical approach with a personal signature. This strategy is used to great success in his series of posters for the poetry festival Poetry on the Road. To create the graphics, Boris writes software that interprets texts and turns them into visual representations.
The 2003 version is particularly beautiful, with each letter of the alphabet being interpreted as a command to draw lines or change the quality of the line being drawn. The result is a complex tangle of shapes, expressive and poetic in their own right but also containing the code of the original poetry that was used as input. There is a simplified interactive version online to illustrate how it works.
Boris recently became professor for Interaction Design at Fachhochschule Potsdam, where he teaches students using Processing and Flash. Expect interesting work from Potsdam in the future…
[...] Eschewing the more magical approaches of previous years, the 2006 edition has seen Müller has gone firmly in the direction of information visualization. Words in a poem are given a numerical code by adding the values of their letters together. This number gives the word its position on a circle, which is marked by a red dot. Gray lines connect the dots in the sequence the words they represent appear in the poem. The diameter of the circle on which the dots are placed is decided by the length of the poem. In this way several poems can be represented in a single image. [...]
I also like to make poems and read lots of books that is related to Poetry.:,~
i love poetry because it is a way of expressing my own feelings.*”"