Becca Ricks – Page 5 – Creative explorations, experiments with code, internet art, design research, and other work.

Finnegans Wake-ify: An experiment in generative text.

Posted on September 12, 2016September 13, 2016 by baricks

For this week’s assignment in Programming A to Z, I built a simple web application that allows the user to input a paragraph of text and a computer program outputs a text that sounds like the stream-of-consciouness writing style characteristic of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

Test out the generator here.

Example output (from an email I’d written):

You scraggy riverrun kidding. I completely agree with you – Eve reason shore war: recirculation interesting to me war: swerve contradictions. commodius shore bay Fantasy, for commodius commodius song “Runaway” catches you off guard vicus it war: recirculation bay Howth Castle to Eve rest Environs commodius album. recirculation every “Runaway,” Howth Castle there scraggy 10 iterations Environs passen-core am isthmus Sir Tristram I scraggy he’s captured isthmus picture Environs Europe kind Environs self-aggrandizement to side penisolate artists become victim. The real question at stake Europe war: to wielderfight degree he war: self aware. vicus everything depends on penisolate doesn’t it? We can’t tolerate blind egoism. It has to be in some way self-referential or winking or ironic.

The web app was built in ReactJS + Webpack + Node.js and you can find the full code repo here.

To do some of the text manipulation, I used nlp_compromise, a node package that allows you to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools in Javascript. I was disappointed, however by how limited the tool was. Next week I plan to explore using the RiTA software toolkit with NLP.

Subreddits talking about a particular subject in the last week.

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by baricks

I attended a session at the Theorizing the Web conference last week about text-based online communities such as Reddit and 4Chan. Text-based communities are ones in which there is a reciprocal relationship between participants and a text: Community members both shape and are shaped by the words that are exchanged in the online conversation.

I’m interested in exploring the kind of language that is being used in subreddit communities. Using an API endpoint I found here and d3.js, I built a simple interactive graph that allows you to see which subreddits have been talking about a particular word in the last week.

See the full visualization here.

You can find the full repository here at GitHub. Some d3.js code below:

Internal Security Zones: Generative instructions for prison design & maintenance.

Posted on May 6, 2016May 9, 2016 by baricks

As of 2016, the U.S. criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in U.S. territories (source). The American prison population has more than quadrupled over the past 25 years, an increase largely driven by heavier penalties for non-violent offenses (source).

Michel Foucault reminds us that power is not static, nor does it emanate from a center of origin. Rather, power exists in an enmeshed network and is wielded by people or groups by way of “episodic” or “sovereign” acts of domination (source). Power is dispersed and pervasive rather than concentrated, embodied, and enacted. Confirming Foucault’s diagnosis of “modern societies of control” (a term used by Gilles Deleuze), Giorgio Agamben argues that biopower operates in physical spaces known as “zones of exception,” physical spaces in which disciplinary power is exercised (source).

In many cases, the architecture of a prison – the panoptical design, the single, impenetrable cells, the isolation and surveillance – causes prisoners to internalize discipline. I’m interested in the material form of prisons. Who designs them? What do the physical spaces look like? What are the material exigencies of daily life?

For my project, I decided to generate a series of instructions for constructing and maintaining a prison environment. I used the U.S. Department of Justice’s Jail Design Guide as primary source text. I also included a list of business advice and aphorisms as well as Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel.”

I created a template that included (1) a title; (2) a chapter subtitle; (3) a set of instructions; (4) a list of material needs; (5) key questions; and (5) a random photo from the handbook. I then used Markov chains to generate some of the text.

The result sounds something like design instructions for a dystopian prison of the future. Here were some generative texts:

I’ve built a Flask application that allows you to generate a new text and photo when you click the button “Generate another.” Right now it’s still locally hosted but I plan to push it online soon.

See my full GitHub repository here. Below is a snippet of the Python program I wrote:

Life expectancy of people in U.S. states – an interactive map

Posted on April 28, 2016April 28, 2016 by baricks

Last week, I found data from The Health Inequality Project detailing the average life expectancy for people who live in various states in America, male and female. I took the information from that dataset and plotted it into an interactive map of the United States.

Check out the interactive map here.

I’m still troubleshooting some problems with the tooltip, which allows users to hover over each state and display the data from that particular state. I seem to be having trouble pulling the data from the corresponding CSV.

You can see my full GitHub repository here.

Here is the full index.js code:

Final presentation: plastic in paradisum

Posted on April 27, 2016April 28, 2016 by baricks

plastic in paradisum is a digital, interactive archive of plastic objects I found washed up on the beach at Dead Horse Bay. It’s a creative interrogation of the social processes that confer value on the objects that surround us.

You can visit the full collection & project website here.

To be honest, I was surprised by how much information about each object was available online. I was able to track down full histories of most objects, including information about the manufacturing company, the material, original newspaper advertisements, and other details I did not expect to find.

Winthrop pHisoHex bottle
Date: 1930-1950
Manufactured: New York, NY
Material: Low density polyethylene plastic
Description:

Winthrop-Stearns Inc. was a pharmaceutical company that underwent several mergers. A 1922 merger resulted in Sterling Drug, an American global pharmaceutical company that was later divided and sold to other pharma companies.

This particular bottle contained pHisoHex (pHisoderm with hexachlorophene), a preoperative cleansing agent for eye surgery. Initially used exclusively by surgeons, the product was later re-marketed to the public as a skin cleanser in the 1950s.

Polyethylene was first manufactured on a commercial scale during the Second World War by the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and eventually American companies began to manufacture polyethylene in the U.S. After the war ended, polyethylene was used to create squeezable bottles for antiperspirant. The flexible squeeze bottle emerged in the 1950s as a high density form of polyethylene.

Here is the final presentation I shared with the class:

The feedback I received from the class was extremely helpful. Most notably, our instructor Stefani pointed out that this project invokes feelings of nostalgia, but perhaps not the disgust that we associate with trash. In short, by decontextualizing the objects we tend to forgot that all this stuff was trash when I found it. Another student suggested adding more objects that are identifiably “trash” – a take-away container, a bottle, a plastic bag, etc. I plan to make adjustments to the project as I prepare the project for ITP’s Spring 2016 show.

Highest peaks in U.S. National Parks.

Posted on April 19, 2016April 20, 2016 by baricks

For this week’s assignment, we were to use d3.js to create a simple graph. I decided to work with a data set I found at R Data Sets that included information about the highest points in national parks.

See the interactive graph here.

I decided to start with a simple animation using the .transition() tool in d3.js. I also created two functions, mouseenter and mouseleave, that are triggered when you hover your mouse over each bar of the graph.

See my full code here.

And here is the index.js file:

Project update: Plastic in paradisum.

Posted on April 18, 2016April 19, 2016 by baricks

What counts as the material of vital materialism? Is it only human labour and the socio-economic entities made by men using raw materials? Or is materiality more potent than that? How can political theory do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in every event and every stabilization? Is there a form of theory that can acknowledge a certain ‘thing-power’, that is, the irreducibility of objects to the human meanings or agendas they also embody?

– Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

This week I continued making 3D scans of the pieces of discarded plastic that I’d found. I need to continue making the 3D scans and figure out the best way to catalogue each item, including information about where and when the item was manufactured, where the item was found, and how long it will take to disintegrate.

A baby doll:

Discarded baby doll

Found: Dead Horse bay, 03/31/2016.
Manufacturer: Unknown
Material: Synthetic rubber (plastic)

A blue bottle:

Discarded hairspray bottle

Found: Dead Horse bay, 03/31/2016.
Manufacturer: Helene Curtis Industries, Inc., Chicago, approx. 1953
Material: Plastic, most likely High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE)
Est. date of decomposition: 2403

A pink bottle:

Discarded pink bottle

Found: Dead Horse bay, 03/31/2016.
Manufacturer: Helene Curtis Industries, Inc.
Material: Plastic

SmartPharmacist: Redux.

Posted on April 8, 2016April 8, 2016 by baricks

Welcome to SmartPharmacist, Rebecca.

Based on our analysis of your condition, we would suggest you start with a low dosage of Levodivdivphine to treat your bipolar disorder.

Levodivdivphine is a antiparkinsonian drug that is prescribed for bipolar disorder and inflated asshole cancer.

Suggested daily dosage is 5 pills a day taken orally, or rubbing the gel form of the drug on your testy lower thigh.

Once upon a time, individuals suffering from bipolar disorder syndrome were prescribed Concerta and AndroGel, but new advancements in the field of fist Physics has helped doctors better remedy this disorder.

Side effects of Levodivdivphine may include: bloody urine, effective toenail, kidney duplex, penile torsion, prideful asshole, and weight increase.

This week, we learned how to write functions in our Python programs. For my assignment, I revisited last week’s SmartPharmacist .py program I wrote, which gives terrible drug advice based on your symptoms. The outcome of the program is the same, but the code I wrote streamlines a lot of the action that takes place.

I wrote two functions – one that streamlines random.choice() and one that more cleanly creates the drug name.

Here’s the rewrite of the code:

You can find the full repository on GitHub.

Private share of total health spending by country.

Posted on April 6, 2016April 7, 2016 by baricks

For this week’s assignment, we were to use SVG graphics and data from Gapminder to create a simple data visualization.

I created two simple data visualizations of this data set that shows, by country, private spend on health as a percentage of the total spending on health. Private health expenditure includes direct household (out-of-pocket) spending, private insurance, charitable donations, and direct service payments by private corporations.

The bubble chart

The first visualization was a bubble chart in which the size of each bubble corresponded to the percentage of the share (see it here). While I thought this method was visually compelling, I also felt that the information could be conveyed more accurately through a different visual. Instead of displaying the countries alphabetically, I thought it would be more informative to display them according to spend.

The bar chart

For the second visualization, I made a bar chart that showed the % private health spend for each country out of the total. I ordered the countries from those that had the highest private spending to the lowest. Check it out here.

Analysis

Visualizing this set of data gave me the ability to quickly compare private/public spend between countries and draw some conclusions.

You can check out my full GitHub repository here.

Other (unrelated) thoughts

We were also asked to respond to a graphic/chart/visual from the website Wait But Why, a popular resource for explaining complex subjects in a simple way. I decided to look at an article that explains the history of Iraq and ISIS. I studied Arabic language/Middle East Studies in college and my undergraduate thesis explored neo-tribalism in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq so I was curious to see if the author of the article got the history right.

I was surprised – the author did a very thorough job explaining the last 100 years in Iraqi history, with particular emphasis on the factors that led to the rise of ISIS. The Sykes-Picot agreement, which is responsible for diving up Iraq and much of the Middle East, is summarized pretty accurately in these two maps:

Source: Wait but why

Plastic in Paradisum: project progress

Posted on April 5, 2016April 5, 2016 by baricks

We are the garbage, the waste, we make it and dump it, to be separated from it is a cancer causing delusion…we cannot separate ourselves, clean and perfect, from the trash we dump out back into the can. Clean is a vision of internal trash, not a mere separation.

– Gerald Vizenor, “Landfill Meditation”

Inanimate things have a life of their own, that deep within them is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other things.

– Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

In keeping with my project timeline, I visited Dead Horse Bay this week to collect the plastic debris that had washed up on the shore for my project. The beach is so littered with debris from the past 200 years that you are unable to walk without stepping on a broken glass bottle or a piece of china. I walked along the shoreline for about three hours in a kind of meditative state, scanning the ground for shiny, colorful plastic among the mounds of discarded objects.

I documented my trip to the beach with this short video filmed on a handheld DSLR.

Once I had collected around 30 pieces of plastic, I started photographing some of the objects in order to create photogrammetric, 3D models of the debris I found. To create the models, I used Photoscan and Meshmixer to clean up the scan, create dense clouds, and add the appropriate texture.

Here’s a snippet of the editing process with a red toy gun that I’d found.

So far I’ve created 3D models of two objects: the red toy gun and a red plastic bottle. Here’s a photo and the final 3D model of the bottle:

Discarded plastic bottle from Dead Horse Bay by Becca on Sketchfab

On a very personal level, the physical rituals of “cataloging” the discarded objects with attention and care — scanning the beach for plastic, picking up each object, washing and scrubbing them one by one, taking between 100-200 photographs of each object — helped me see these objects in a different light. Instead of something to be trashed and forgotten, each object revealed its own energy and vitality (to steal a phrase from Jane Bennet).

The poet A.R. Ammons once remarked that maybe garbage was the “sacred image of our time.” When asked about the religious undertones in his book-length poem Garbage by The Paris Review, Ammons said: “My hope was to see the resemblances between the high and low of the secular and the sacred. The garbage heap of used-up language is thrown at the feet of poets, and it is their job to make or revamp a language that will fly again. We are brought low through sin and death, and hope that religion can make us new.”

Waste isn’t meaningless; waste is saturated with meaning. It’s subject to the same value-creation processes that we apply to all the objects in our environment. With my project, I’m aiming to help people really evaluate their own relationships with discarded objects. I want to examine the social processes that confer value on the objects that surround us and put discarded plastic waste in dialogue with religious/magical objects.

Still left to to: scan the rest of the plastic, put all the .obj files on Sketchfab, create a website for the project, finalize and build the physical installation, and build the virtual environment. An overview of the plan of action:

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