Infinite Sprawl is a collaborative artware tool to interact and construct a building from user supplied text. We asked viewers to submit what modernism is to them. The software loads these submissions and casts each word into a specific shape based on the parts of speech (e.g. adjective is ornamental, whereas a noun is rudimentary, foundational) and the scale based on the word's significance within a webcrawled corpus of modernist writings. Users interact with a touchtable interface to select these words from the body of submissions. By selecting a word and dragging it into the building space, the word is converted into its shape form and can be added to the building. The building in the workspace is versioned periodically and presented as an archive on one of the projection surfaces. The other projection is a cloud of available words, with each word particle interacting with each other based on its parameters.
We created InfiniteSprawl to reinvestigate modernism - specifically Walter Gropius' call in the Bauhaus Manifesto for a "new guild of craftsmen" to "..desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together." We were interested in contextualizing this within various communities from architecture to electronic-literature and also the approach of a collectivist or open development and its parallels with open source software and video art/artware communities.
Matt Nelson and I worked on the development of the hardware and software dimensions of the project and Mark Anderson worked on the machines, constructing the space and PR.
My role specifically was to develop the shape casting system, database interactions, rendering the scene and the word cloud and using c++, mysql, OpenGL and python.
