Poster mock-up. Intended approx. size: A0. (Mockup created by BlueMonkeyLab)
A Pure Visual
With this piece of data visualisation, I wanted to create an image which explores the body of poetic work János Pilinszky produced, in a purely visual way, using text as a kind of texture. My starting point for this was the idea of reaching silence as an artist, like composer John Cage did with his silent piece 4'33".
With his fourth volume, Splinters, Pilinszky noticeably started writing poems that were more succinct in both form and content and this tendency continued until he reached complete silence in 1975 when he stopped writing poetry.
Intended to be printed in A0 format or viewed and explored in its original size.
Poster mock-up. Intended approx. size: A0. (Mockup created by BlueMonkeyLab)
Pilinszky's Poetic Oeuvre
"I'm a poet and I'm Catholic." – János Pilinszky
This visual explores Pilinszky's life and poetry and the parallels between the two. There are three sections, connected by lines. On the left, all of Pilinszky's poems are drawn from top to bottom, each a line, in chronological order to show how his poems had gradually become shorter and shorter. The dates in the middle show how many poems he wrote in the given year; the larger the type, the more were written, and vice versa. The lines pointing from the years to the lines on the left show the amount of pieces produced for each cycle of his career. The viewer is invited to explore this piece with the help of the annotations on the right.
Created by Sámuel Setényi using Processing. Poems written by János Pilinszky. As opposed to the purely visual piece, this image contains annotations and explanations and thus it is more of a design piece. Intended to be printed in A0 format or viewed and explored in its original size.
Part of the code for the first piece.
Part of the source file containing the poems for the Processing code.
Part of the code for the second piece.
Part of the spreadsheet which stored the data for and drove the code for the second piece.
The Data and the Code
These visuals were created entirely by code. I used Processing for this project. For the first piece, I used a text file containing all the poems by Pilinszky (source) to drive the Processing sketch which then arranged each poem in separate lines and then drew the lines from top to bottom with their sizes depending on the individual poem length. Longer the poem, smaller the type, and vice versa.
For the second piece, I created a CSV spreadsheet and used it to drive the visuals, that were generating using Processing. The lines of poems on the left were drawn using the code from the previous piece. For creating the spreadsheet, I took the data from the Hungarian Digital Literary Academy. You can see examples of the code as well above.
For more information, go to my website: www.samuelsetenyi.com
