Display Project Development

I had done alot of research for this project but was a little stuck for ideas. I had also forgotten about it a little as I was preoccupied with the other three projects. But the weekend before the group crit I knuckled down and had a good think about what wanted to do. I made this brainstorm of sorts to try and show off my ideas for the group crit.

I thought about doing something physical, like a sculpture, to display some sort of information. But I was a little unsure as to what information I should display. I thought about using the theme of music. Song count, artist count or word count and using something small to represent the values, like foam dots stacked up to form a sort of bar chart. But then I decided to head in a more graphic direction. I had an idea where I could alphabetize all the words in a song and then stack them up to show the frequency of each word and it would look sort of like a bar chart. It would also be quite ambiguous, as in it would be hard to see what the text was from when it was organised in this way.
Below is the first try out of this idea.

I printed out the lyrics and then cut out each stack of words and stuck them onto a straight line. It was quite time consuming so I only did about a third of the song. It also didn't look very polished, so I thought stacking the words up and arranging them on the computer, then printing them out as a graph would look better.

I tried printing them on different positions on the page, and also arranging them in a long strip and grouping them together in differnt ways.

Printed along the middle of the page and arranged in a strip.

Printed along the bottom of the page and arranged in a strip.

Printed on the bottom of the page and arranged in a column, also spaced quite far apart.

Printed on the bottom of the page, arranged in a column and spaced closer together.

Printed along the bottom of the page and arranged in two strips.

Printed on the bottom of the page and arranged in a long strip.

I did try to print it out on one long strip of paper but my computer and printer refused to co-operate. So I ended up printing it on separate pieces of paper. But this sort of helped when I was tried out different arrangements. I used two different songs. A short song with some repetition and a much longer one with a lot more repetition. I think when I present it, it might be best to display the name and artist of the song, so people get a vague idea of what the piece is. I also plan to display a series of songs, maybe 4 or 6 and they will be from different genres of music to contrast between well-written songs and pop song generated purely for commercial success.

So I will now be investigating other possible songs and ways to display the final piece.