An introduction to PolychromeText
NOTE: as of 03.2025 this needs a massive update. As does the code.
What are you talking about?
THIS is PolychromeText - a text-painter web-app.
Ever since I was a wee nipper, I've wanted to be able to create with text the way Jackson Pollock created with paint: dripping, flinging, pouring, etc.
Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko are also influences in various ways. Warhol's screen-prints led me to think how "text" is almost infinitely repeatable, and thus not a comodity, like a painting or a print could be. That led me down many roads with physical concrete poetry, typewriters and text paintings. Rothko is perhaps a more oblique influence, but he was me entree to color-field painting, and how several of my college classmates couldn't stand abstract paintings like that - their irritated descriptions filled me with a desire to create something similarly monolithic. I don't think I ever really did anything over-all until recently).
In early 2014 I took a "MOOC" on Processing, and one of my exercises became Polychrometext, so-named since it's second-week of life (it had a brief life as "Text-Painter" which is accurate if prosaic). I used the "Javascript Mode" to bring the sketch to the web. Eventually, I converted it to use Processing.js, and in 2018 moved on to p5js.
The app has continued to evolve, perhaps slowly, as I continue to simultaneously "focus" on both the output and the internals - I am a programmer during the day, and "good" code is important to me. Working on this project is a chance to express my viusal sense, but also exercise my code-skills. That said, I wouldn't necessarily hold it up as a stellar example of my work - it is highly unplanned and imperfect, filled with comments and side-tracks. Hopefully, it does show several things that I care about, and I would encourage anybody who wants to have a long-lived creative-coding project to realize that organizing the code makes it so much easier to grow your code.
Most of them are also dumped into Flickr.