This is my friend Tahir Hemphill’s project.  He is now a resident at Eyebeam in NYC developing the project further.  Here’s the description of the project:

The Hip-Hop Word Count (HHWC) is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day. The database is the heart of an online analysis tool that generates textual and quantified reports on searched phrases, syntax, memes and socio-political ideas.

The database is now being built and visualizations of the data are beginning to emerge, the first ones shown last week at Eyebeam Open Studios.  It’s an exciting prospect to imagine what will crystallize from so many songs and artists creating within hip-hop.  Below are some early releases from the project:

A gallery of results from a “rubric that estimates the education level needed to understand each rhyme as well as, rates the artistic sophistication employed through the metaphors, similes, cultural references, consonantal/vocalic alliteration and overall pattern of each rhyme.”:

From Jay Z’s body of work:

Here is the link to the first Rap Data Pack™ we have released. It includes the raw data from Hov’s complete body of work: word count, readability, release dates, Geo Codes, etc..

Keep checking in at Tahir’s Staple Crops site to stay abreast as the project develops.

“iheart times square” was a recent public arts proposal for installation in Times Square, as part of the Renewable Times Square project.  Architect Ceren Bingol assisted the creation of the proposal.  The following is an abstract of the project:

The words of “iheart times square” explore mutable texts as interactive poetry. An original poem is written; its words are split apart and painted on the ground as large-scale standalone objects. The location of the words invite the visitors to either find the intended flow of the poem or discover meaning based on the random flow of their travel.

Like love, iheart knows no boundaries. Text is picture, picture is text; the path is the destination. The words and symbols of “iheart times square” shift in scale from the local to the universal, i.e. the words “cross roads” symbolize both the physical nature of the street grid as well as the melting pot of diverse visitors at Times Square. The symbols also vary in scale to address multiple pedestrian flows and heights by which viewers may view the Broadway plazas.

The poem I wrote to be painted:

iheart
standing here
at the crossroads of the world
a square of electric aspiration
where the world is a screen
an extended american dream
spectacular commerce of a people
in a new agora
holding the beacon of hope
a torch of imprisoned light
yearning to be free
in a land where
love is the common currency
out of many
we are one
[sic]

These small thumbnails below are clickable, showing the rest of the visual proposal:

The winning proposal is an infographic, a safe bet in public art these days.  Proposed by Molly Dilworth, the project will show infrared satellite data of Manhattan in shades of blue.  Where huge abstract sculptures dot the modernist public art landscape, today we see many projects featuring visually appealing interpretations of contemporary datasets.  The outlined twist is that it’s supposed to look like a river in Times Square and keep it cool.

———-

To view the overall iheart project, click here.

To view Ceren Bingol’s works and blog, click here.

June 10, 2010
The third intervention in an ongoing series at the Witzenhausen Gallery in Chelsea, NYC.
Created and written by [sic]

Original Poem:

am i transformed?
painted and recombined
frozen by contact with capital
the blood of the earth
on my hands
is this hope © ?
how about change
that promise
that universal constant
freedom
to break the chains
standing up
to keep hope alive

———–

On display at Witzenhausen Gallery until September 2010:

tuesday to saturday 11 am – 6 pm or by appointment 

547 west 27th street
suite 530, 5th floor
click for map

t. +1 (212) 239 1124 

www.witzenhausengallery.nl

thanks to the RE/mix festival for inspiration and venue for the original “am i transformed?” diptych paintings

www.remixedmedia.org

For more information and pictures on this mural + the overall iheart project,  check out the website.

For more information and pictures on this mural + the overall iheart project,  check out the website.

Author’s Note: This is a republished historical post after the Feb2008 relaunch of Soulincode:

The Revolutionary Voices panel held February 26, 2005 @ NYU:

The panel included:

Chuck D, Hank Shocklee, Daddy O, Fab Five Freddy, Vernon Reid and Will Calhoun (Living Colour), two S1W body guards

Some rough notes (these are not direct quotes):

Play your lane.
-Daddy O

He was outlining that the key to making our way in life is to make sure you are focused on doing what you are naturally here to do. Surround yourself with people who will call on you when you’re swaying out of that lane. This is not to say you do the same thing for your whole life, only that in any given moment of time, there is a natural lane in which to travel, both for the individual and groups that individual works within.

How do you sell your soul to a soul-less nation? Give it away.
-Chuck D

When everything is commodified before it can mature, where the soul is sucked out in consumption economy, how can you sell without selling out?

Smart people figure out how to survive in everyday society, they become silent…but you have to reveal everything that comes your way.
-Chuck D

Survival and profit instincts of an intelligent but less activist human being will suggest silence in the face of wrongful actions. Bystander apathy. Speak out, cuz the next one taken away might be you.

Once we move beyond thinking of ourselves first, a higher plane of consciousness is possible.
-Hank Shocklee

This quote may seem self-evident, but a few notes…first, a major percentage of humans never truly come face to face and attempt to address this idea in true sense of action and thought. Second, how many hip-hop artists speak or create songs in these terms today?

The real estate of the millenium is minds. The real estate is in you.
-Chuck D

Protect your dome.
-S1W bodyguard

Commenting that back in the 80s, it was about forming your own dome around you in terms of your friends and society, to fight against encroaching powers taking over culture. Now those forces are moving into the last frontier, your own mind. One has to learn how to protect the dome of our mind and senses from the onslaught.

Author’s Note: This is a republished historical post after the Feb 2008 relaunch of Soulincode:

Graphic Novel:

A graphic novel is a novel or novella done in the medium of comics. It is typically a long-form work rather than a short publication such as an individual comic book, analogous to a novel rather than a short story. A graphic novel need not be a complete work unto itself, much as some novels are merely installments of an even longer work. When a graphic novel is a reprint of stories from a periodical publication, it is referred to as a trade paperback.

The term is also used by creators and readers who want to differentiate their work from lighter works intended for children.
Source: Wikipedia

At the time of the pioneering graphic novelists, I was still a child, an avid comics fan with a monthly subscription to many titles. Back then, I paid more attention to my favorite illustrators than writers: John Byrne, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane. Neal Adams, Norm Breyfogle. My focus on writers rested mostly on the rule that they better provide enough story opportunities for my artists to shine.

Then I began to notice that some of these illustrators were also writers, and more importantly, that a even a great illustrator cannot hide a bad story. And then a bomb dropped within my understanding of comics as literature: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. In this radical Batman story, an aging Bruce Wayne brings his alter-ego out of retirement to face a more deadly and violent Gotham City. Gotham is a seedy pit of apocalyptic despair, Superman a tool of the state who eventually abides by the powers-that-be to do battle with his old friend Batman…for a kid who grew up a fan of Superman as the purest hero of mankind, this kind of sotry is a reality shock. In Frank Miller’s Gotham, good and evil exist in the grey zone, characters age and die spectacularly, and reflections of real geopolitics are integral to the plot.

As a story with weight and meaning, the Dark Knight Returns, along with titles like Alan Moore’s “The Watchmen”, began laying the groundwork for the evolution of comics into graphic novels, a new style of 20th century literature.  Where traditional novels rely on letters and words within sentences for symbolic representation, graphic novels and comics use a visual language which smoothly combines pictorial and textual symbols in a unified narrative form. The best graphic novels are a cross between narrative poetry and graphic design, mixed with an understanding of novel and cinematic story principles. As narrative poetry, a graphic novel’s textual story elements must be condensed, controlled, and rhythmic within a limited page space. As a graphic design, care must be taken to integrate panels, characters, landscapes, and the graphical symbols into a unified story design across time. What leads to what, where does the audience eye move on the page, and how does the “reading” relate to the flow of text meeting image?

In terms of book meets cinema, words, graphics, panels, dialogue, and action blur and merge in a reader’s head as the pages turn; frame to frame, the authors (writer and artist) create a continuous understanding of a visual/textual story in motion. Some graphic novels, such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen, or the stories and graphics of Moebius, read cover to cover like a film storyboard sequence. At the same time, unlike cinema, the graphic novel explodes the frame/screen at times. Graphic novel panels and subpanels can be fractured, overlaid, the “frame” or “window” expanding and contracting to fit the flow and scenes. In addition, whereas the viewer of a film is locked into a 24 frame per second timecode lockstep of images, a graphic novel reader only sees keyframes of action, his/her mind filling in much of the implied motion and action of the story.

Graphic novels, comics and Japanese manga/anime represent a significant contribution to the postmodern conception of hero and myth. Only in the past few years has the entertainment market brought the more traditional aspects of this subculture to the mass market: Spiderman, The Hulk, Daredevil, The Punisher, Hellboy – all comic book characters and stories brought to the big screen. The more mainstream titles fit well into traditional epics, clear black and white divisions of heroes and villains, storylines that reinforce the American definitions of good and evil.

But there is a more complex, eye-opening underground within the graphic novel sphere, with its writers and artists overtly and covertly affecting postmodern culture. Artists like Moebius are long-time contributors to core visual and story concepts in Hollywood films like “Alien”, “Tron”, “Dune”, “The Fifth Element”, “The Abyss”, and “Blade Runner”.

Matrix creators, the Wachowski brothers, who used to write for Marvel Comics, hired Geof Darrow to create many of the visual designs for the movie. As well, the entire Matrix movie was storyboarded by comic book artists in a graphic novel style, where the panels represented keyframes of the script’s beats. This comic format not only served to inform the way the story and cinematography made it on-screen, it at first provided a strong sell-point to Hollywood executives who needed a clear easy-to-understand vision to help them visualize and understand such an ambitious film project. Later on, the brothers went on to make Matrix off-shoots that harken back to their comics and anime passions: Animatrix, animated shorts by top Japanese writers and animators that expand Matrix story, and Matrix Comics under the Burlyman label. Example of storyboard vs film sequences are shown below:

Darren Aronofsky, writer and director of “Pi”, modeled his film’s aesthetic on Frank Miller’s “Sin City” graphic novel, a noir design with black and white, no grey tones whatsoever. Here are two shots, one showing a page from Miller’s Sin City, the other frames from Aronofsky’s “Pi”:

Why are so many filmmakers, designers, writers, animators, and artists moving in these same circles of thought? The answer is easier explored via direct experience exploring the vast intellectual and story reaches of these productions. In particular, with the titles I link to via the cover images at the top of this post, there is a focus on fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk, sociopolitics, metaphysics and ways of seeing.

Much of these art forms harken back to archetypal mythologies; comic characters are complex yet graphically more simple than film or video. In this space between reality and symbolic representation lies a more fluid space to explore conscious and subconscious, where viewers have an easier time looking at drawings as a mixture of fantasy and reality. Only video games can come close to representing a form of story and media as deeply entrenched in this postmodern experience of reality.

In addition to the wide creative palette of graphic novels, the form, medium and distribution via print follows a long history of propagating fringe cultural ideas ahead of their time. The fact that this artform is relegated by most cultural critics to kids pulp fiction acts as an advantage for its subcultural camoflauge. As guerilla semiotics, comics exist beneath-the-radar as coded narratives embedded within the product streams of capital. They are collectible items in the form of serials, relatively cheap and readily accessible to youth populations. The graphic novel can function as cultural cryptography, often filled with avantgarde ideas set within populist frameworks.

Comics and graphic novels absorb and explore many of the core concepts of 20th century art movements focused on pushing perceptions of space and time.  Sequence, text, and picture morph between reality memory and dream,  one-point perspective suddenly flips into multiples.   As sequential art, this flow is often seamless for the human mind to absorb and build upon, received in pieces but constructed into a unified whole.

Thus we see the entry of graphic novels and comics into academia for study as a powerful new mode of literature and human communication.   With film, television, comics and video games as the media powers of the 20th century, we shall see what comes next in the 21st.

——————

The header image of this post shows a cross-section of major titles to check out, from authors Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Scott McCloud, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison. The links lead to Amazon entries for each title, where you can learn more. Below is further reading on the topic of graphic novels:

Wired Article: Moebius : Jean Giraud’s stunning cartoons scan like movies

Ugo.com : Interview of BurlyMan Matrix Comics Spencer Lamm interview with

Integrative Arts 10 : Post-Modern Graphic Novels

New York Times Magazine: Not Funnies, a look at the more novelistic and less hero/myth oriented graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman, Seth, etc.