This was my final project for the class I took this summer. Written in Processing and my first foray into 3D with OpenGL. It’s available currently as a Java application to play around with here. A description/explanation is below.

Chicago Skyline by Carl Sandburg is an exploration of the shape of poems. In prose of course there is the paragraph which normally ends with the completion of a thought. In poetry line breaks are used more expressively and can give the poem a distinct shape. This project is an investigation of the shapes of poems. Sandburg’s book Chicago Poems contains exactly what the title describes, poems about Chicago. If one rotates a poem 90 degrees counter clockwise and creates a trace of the text the resulting shape is reminiscent of a skyline.

Doing this with the first ten pages of Chicago Poems and turning the outlines in to three dimensional buildings creates a city. This city obscures the words of the text and focuses on the form the text creates. In the absence of true synesthesia, this projects creates a visual Chicago from Sandburg’s words about the city. The result looks nothing like the real city of Chicago, it is Sandburg’s Chicago.

To further analyze the shape of the text, line ending punctuation is used to construct ornaments on top of the buildings. These ornaments are specifically designed to evoke the shape of the punctuation used, a period or dot becomes an antenna and a comma or quote becomes a slanted antenna array. And to illustrate the form within each line in Version 4 of the project every instance of white space is illuminated with lit up windows on the sides of the buildings. With these windows illuminated we can see Sandburg’s choices in word length as well as indentation.