Inspiration + Ideas
After a close friend of mine recently experienced SA by an Uber Driver, the response she received from the company was, “We are taking bold, transparent steps as a company, we’ve not only improved the safety of our own platform; we’re setting a new standard for safety in our industry” however, the actual “steps” were not proposed.
My generative idea would be to collect a series of company press statements (on climate change, sexual assault, data, mental health etc) and generate slogans from these that would then go on propaganda/political style posters (like the above). The hypothesised outcome is that the slogans would be just as “wishy washy” as the original press statements. The final piece is titled, “Your generated statements don’t mean anything to me.“
The Code
I wanted to push myself away from using Illustrator & Photoshop (software I am highly experienced in) and make the entire poster generatively in p5 (something I struggle with.) Tega suggested that the variability that the code produces doesn’t have to be only the text but images also. I made a bank of images that I pulled from Google searching for things that I thought would pair well with the generated text to make a statement. These included photos of CEO’s who’s company have faced notable issues: H&M, Shein, Equinox, Facebook, Weinstein Company, BP Oil etc.
Some of the gibberish that it made below:
Scroll to the end for final results…
https://editor.p5js.org/edenmili/sketches/tQJf6BjwV
Printing!
My first time printing by myself but it turned out okay!
Results:
After clicking through the posters that my code generated hundreds of times these were some that I thought to be super cool. From Left to right we have the CEO of equinox saying that data would be more protected, a discussion of tolerance over an image of Harvey Weinstein, a very vague point on top of an oil spill, the CEO of uber with text that reads “Today Announced Dedication & Commitment!” (This one is my favourite), Mack Zuckerberg & finally another oil spill.
The smaller text reads the same on each poster, “SAID CEO IN PRESS STATEMENT RELEASED TODAY.”
