Visual Interpretation of Text Project Phrase

/ 2 September 2013

Today in Computer Art we were assigned our first project. For this project we are to visually interpret a short written phrase across 2 images using nothing but the words of the phrase itself, and only black, white, and one other color. The first steps in this project are sketching 20 different possible pairs of images. I will take photos of each pair and put them up here as a gallery in a post this weekend or a week from today, once they are all complete. But right as I begin to sketch out the repertoire of potential images I felt like sharing with you the phrase I will use for this project:

strategists will need to answer many fundamental questions

This comes from Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy (for those curious, this phrase appears on page 48), something I’ve read at least twice (and probably more) throughout my time as a Peace Studies major here. I first was assigned to read it in Spring 2011 for the Theory and Practice of Nonviolence course that I was in. Right when finding out what the first project was I knew I’d want to draw on something Gene Sharp wrote, so it was just a matter of exactly what phrase would make the most sense for this project. Though the phrase is directly connected to something written by someone who is an expert on nonviolent resistance (and inarguably tied to the creation of the Peace Studies program here, as I noted a year ago), I carefully chose it so that the viewer could potentially interpret the end images to mean something entirely different.

Any thoughts or comments you’d want to share regarding the direction I’ve chosen to take the first project for my Computer Art class are always welcome.

Discussion