2019 Place and Colour
Place and Color: Excerpt from exhibition video. Video by William Ward.
Contributors: William Ward; Stanislav Roudavski; Mark Burry; Gini Lee; Jeff Malpas; Mark Taylor.
Presented as part of the Place and Parametricism exhibition at Real/Material/Ethereal: The 2nd Annual Design Research Conference at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Tags: #place-and-parametricism; #place; #colour; #literature
This work contributes to better understanding and design of places within architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. Computation is now common in design, but some researchers criticise digital methods for their lack of qualitative engagement with place. The project obtains evidence to alleviate such concerns and inform the ethical use of computational in design. Focusing on one aspect of place representation, the project asks: how can literary descriptions of places contribute to their understanding and design? In response to this question, we hypothesise that computational analysis of texts can improve the understanding of place representations in literary descriptions.
To test this hypothesis, the project studies interrelationships between colour and place in one trilogy: Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. The project uses computation to analyse the narrative and highlight characteristic examples. We use natural language processing to extract word lists of place and colour terms. Our techniques demonstrate relationships between these terms, their positions, and roles in the narrative as well as within their historical and semantic contexts. The experiments demonstrate that computational techniques do not undermine the imaginative capacity of literature. Instead, they provide an additional resource for understanding and creativity. The recorded work visually relates place nouns and colour adjectives to passages in the novel. It provides an innovative demonstration of the use of language to build impressions of places.
This work has been selected for the exhibition within the Real/Material/Ethereal: The 2nd Annual Design Research Conference, a leading disciplinary research event. The work is supported by the ARC DP170104010 grant and co-created with leaders in their fields. The publications are forthcoming, and the team are in discussions with the curators at the National Gallery of Victoria where this work will form a part of a major exhibition.
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