14th-century lovers with 21st-century bodies
14th-Century Lovers with 21st-Century Bodies is my final project for my Art 22: Coding for Artists class. It combines my love for literature and coding. Think of it as Romeo and Juliet meets the digital age.
*note: press enter on your keyboard a lot (make sure your cursor is in the chat window. it will pop up wherever your cursor is) & then you’ll get the error messages :)
Vision
Personally, when I approach coding projects for art courses, I need there to be a story and I tend to move away from the abstract or a complex artwork for the sake of its intricateness. Simple or not, there needs to be a story for me and this project represents that. After countless hours spent on making countless projects, I came across one that I knew spoke to me. Coming about it was really through messing around with a lot of P5 functions - the ones I liked and the ones I already did before. What better way to culminate from Art 22 than combine my strengths?
Execution
P5/javascript is the main tool in creating the project.
I used P5 library for a lot of my questions. I also used parts of Juan Manuel Escalante's (my professor) Array Simple code to make my project.
Error Message Generator by atom smasher.org
AIM Chat Image by mugshot.org but found on that site/google
Windows sounds by Windows.
Meaning
This is both an alternate ending to the arguably most famous love story, Romeo and Juliet, but also, the same ending. I'm obsessed with paradoxes - specifically, the paradox of making all of the sense in the world and absolutely making no sense in hell. How can it be the same but different ending? With mystery. Juliet is chatting with Romeo and he asks her to meet him. She tries to agree but then after 12-ish error messages, her computer shuts down. Does she meet him? Maybe not so it's a different ending. But the computer shuts down her internet love. So in a way, she died with it. It's a great parallel for a lot of us who use technology to foster a relationship and how not having social media profiles means "you don't exist" and not being active on those files leads our friends and family to joke "i thought you were dead lol". So because she has "died", it's completely the same ending. Romeo will think she's "dead" (or maybe that she ghosted him... and ghosts = dead) and he'll "die" too and the misunderstanding is created again.
Another component to understanding my project is that we're told that technology is an extension of our bodies not apart from it. So I wanted to replicate that in a literal sense where human bodies acted like computer systems. Here, Juliet's inner sensible warnings are preventing her from meeting Romeo and the Windows error sound helps convey that she shouldn't send her response. Similarly, the Windows shutting down sound is the sound of her death. The screen doesn't say "shutting down though" but rather her last lines, "there rust, and let me die".
BONUS PROJECT
If you’ve read this far, here’s another coding project I'm proud of: “K” - a code manifestation of my frustration with people that just respond with this one letter. How are you even supposed to respond to that? Ugh.
Press “k” on your keyboard to reveal Tiffany Pollard being annoyed. Make sure your cursor is on the chat window. Unlike the project above, there is no limit to the Tiffany Pollards on your screen. Go bananas!