sunday in the sunday in the (the eleventh hour submission)

[kayserifserif]

I've been wanting to participate in this but couldn't figure out a good idea early enough — apologies! Here's something I came up with today:

I love Stephen Sondheim's musical "A Sunday in the Park with George", based on the painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. There's also a scene from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" that's always stuck with me, where the kids go to the Art Institute of Chicago and Cameron stares at the painting, each shot cutting closer and closer till you see individual points on the canvas in exquisite, confusing detail.

sunday in the sunday in the is a project combining the Seurat work with the Sondheim work, sampling colors from the image to select words from the musical lyrics. Each line of text corresponds to a row of the image. Here's a version of the first line:

Currently the list of words is a shuffled list of unique words from the musical, with some smattering of punctuation — there might be a more interesting way to curate them or seed the randomness but it's interesting enough for me so far.

In the first few runs of this, what immediately jumps out to me are the places where you can read what colour values the words are representing. If I put in some kind of alphabetisation this could be even more clear, but for example, this is one version of the last line of the text, where "unfinished" is what happened to represent the black of the image border:

I'd love to keep working on this to refine the arrangement of the word list and ideally produce a PDF of the text side-by-side with the image. Possibly, in reference to the Ferris Bueller scene, different pages featuring the image cropped in different ways. I'm currently using a lower-res version of the image but Wikimedia has a 30000x19970 version of the image and I'm so curious what kind of results the higher fidelity image would produce through this code.

Thanks for reading and thanks everyone else for submitting such interesting works! Hope to participate again next year and get an earlier start too :)

[kayserifserif]

Oh, I didn't realise it was supposed to be GMT! Sorry for the technically late submission 😴

[kayserifserif]

the painting, for easy reference :)

[hugovk]

Good stuff!

It appears the NaNoGenMo Clocks Subcommittee is in a generous mood this year (#51 (comment)), have a completed label!

[dariusk]

I love this musical and I love this project :)

[dariusk]

(how much do I have to pay Mandy Patinkin to read even a portion of this aloud?)

[kayserifserif]

@dariusk ah thank you!! Am working on some of those improvements and extensions so hopefully can share a bit more if these issues don't get closed :)

And yeah, I bet he'd make the nonsense sound amazing :)