Happy New Year.
Not sure what to tag today’s log, I’m still working with the tileset from Grotto, but it’s moving into other areas, like the cellular automata I started working with a few months ago. I’m starting to take all of the small javascript projects that use the tiles and bring them together into a single repository with a separate node.js app that would hypothetically get input from switches or other devices and then switch between/effect the small projects.
One experiment I did today was to come up with names for almost all of the tiles and keymappings so that they could be typed onscreen with a keyboard in a p5.js sketch. I also added code to bring in text from a text file to be automatically typed on screen over time. Playing with the idea that cultural conceptions of spatialized time are heavily influenced by text orientation (many western left-to-right writers see time as moving from left to right, as evidenced by things like media player timelines), I set the makeshift writing app to write from bottom to top or top to bottom using toggle buttons. It’s difficult for me to see the letters not reading from left-to-right at a glance, however. In the world that this characterset comes from, the future is up and the past is down, but we are oriented most often as subjects moving into the past, not into the future, so we still write downwards.
It will take work to integrate these different experiments together since they are written quite differently. While I work on that, I’ll also start thinking about the industrial design of the device that they will run on. I’m imagining two devices- a cold war slab-computer invented by a Mormon like sect and an older wooden Catholic-esque computer. Both will have peripherals and different functions. It’s possible that I’ll make two new variants of the tilesets, one with Kurrent text and one with Deseret, or with new fantasy charactersets inspired by both.
