book of nows

Generative image-poem

Edition of 3,652

2023

Available as an NFT on Prohibition

(The images shown here are possible results from the algorithm. The link above will show the actual NFTs minted as part of the edition.)

From the project description:

“Book of Nows (Vol. 1) is a generative book of text-image poems about daily, domestic time. If every invocation of the algorithm is a page, and each page is a day, then when the Book of Nows (Vol. 1) is complete it will be a book that is ten years long.

[…]

The script begins by choosing a type of day: “day of labor” or “day of rest.” The two types of day determine both what text and times of day can be chosen. The different times of day are: “the pre-dawn” (for “day of labor” only), “the morning,” “the daytime,” “dusk,” “the night,” and “the quiet hours” (for “day of rest” only).

The time of day also determines the color palette. The color palettes were constructed by taking photographs of objects and scenes in my daily routine during the specified times of day. I pulled 2 - 4 colors from each photograph that were emotionally or symbolically resonant. Each palette contains 12 - 23 colors, and each image-poem can contain between two and the maximum for that palette.

The text of each image-poem is short and highly-constrained: words with up to four letters, five if they include the special ligatures of the Threshold Alphabet. Like our days, they contain both repetition and difference. The features script is written to generate a second, text-based poem based on the type of day, the time of day, and how the fabric pattern is constructed. The image-poem text is tangled in a generative pattern abstracted from woven and folded fabric (clothing, sheets, curtains, towels). The pattern adds another layer of legibility/illegibility to the text, both obscuring and revealing, like light, memory, experience, or time. The two texts and the pattern are meant to be read together, as a complete image-poem that catches just a moment in our growing constellations of days.”

The NFT version is priced to be affordable (about $5.70 when the project was posted). NLP subscribers get a free NFT—please reach out over email if you’d like one.

The project and its code are also viewable here: https://editor.p5js.org/acohick/sketches/62ZJCPu8F

Pressing the “play” button on the p5 page will generate a new poem each time. The “embedded text” appears in the console below the code. If you click on the image and then press the “s” key you can save a png copy of the image to your device.