Recently, I've been interested in creating alternative mappings of cities as "memories" through digital momentos and emotions, as well as the themes of decay, crumbling, and ephemerality. This piece is comprised of layers of digital abstractions of my digital mind space over the past six months in Austin, incorporating many digital creation tools in the process to push my thinking on abstraction and generative design. My process started with a poem I wrote about Austin from the depths of my Notion notes. Then, I asked ChatGPT to scramble the words using an algorithm that reflected crumbling and decay. Finally, I wrote a p5.js program to map the poem according to letter rules using several random seeds, and used personal photos of my experiences in Austin to stand in as punctuation and rules for changing directions. The results are overlaid onto a separate abstraction written in p5.js of a friend's favorite line from the poem "blurry feminine shadows,” and the colors are inspired by an Austin sunset.

Built by Kellyn Dassler

Mediums: p5.js, generative algorithms, ChatGPT’s decayed scrambling of letters, written word, photography, memories with brilliant friends