Lost in translation is a multimedia project that explores the relationships between different methods of storing and translating data into different formats
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
Text file downloaded from Project Gutenberg [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17192] edited to feature the poem in its entirety
JPG Image generated after translating each character to a pixel value in RGB
Text generated from the generated image displaying data loss of JPG compression
Above: The poem 'The raven' by Edgar Allan Poe is ingested by a custom made script in processing, which reads each character, assigns a RGB color, and writes the pixel in a new image. Then that image is read by another script which does the opposite and saves the resulting text
Sample of 1/15 of the pixels of the image
Each pixel is represented as a 1x1 cube displaced in X and Y according to their position in the image
The Z transformation is ruled by the hue of each pixel
3D visualization of the full pixel data contained in the generated image
Separation is ruled by the hue of each pixel
Above: The image generated from the text of the poem is ingested by yet another processing script which reads each pixel and creates a box, assigns the color read, and translates it accordingly
Below: The same image is imported as RAW data into audacity; it's encoded and saved as MP3
Audio generated from the pixel data in the generated image
This audio file is encoded in the lowest setting using only 8000 samples in order to display the artifacts of MP3 compression
This project was inspired by the work of Jeffrey Thompson, Rosa Menkman, and the general scope & aesthetics of data visualization.
