Cyberflowers

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. Grew up and living in the digital era, we have built a common sense and intuitively perceive those shapes, composed of curvatures, lines, and solid surfaces, as meaningful pieces. This perception, emerging only in the recent hundreds of years, is so strong, just like our centrality of social cognition of faces, forces us to form meanings around even arbitrary graphics, however, can also be easily destroyed as far as I'm concerned. Different coloring, margin, sizes, or even a tiny change to the familiarized radian and stroke length, can easily make us lose the conformity of it being text and rather stimuli our imagination. With simple and repeated revolving, I created a new form of text art that I'd like to call Cyberflowers - made of digital typography and grew from the digital texts in the cyberspace. Here you can see how individual letters gradually break their shape-based meaning and become blooming cyberflowers while the curves and lines become cyber-petals and cyber-stamens. Then I tried to push this arbitrary imagination further, from a single character, to words and lines. Every word is a seed of an idea. And seeds of thoughts with distinct emotion, arousal, attitude, and meaning would grow into different flowers of affects (n. emotion or desire, especially as influencing behavior or action). I built a Chrome extension based on the art to help people find positive or negative sentiments on the web (for fun), with the help of ml5.js sentiment library.