Your Story #67

Art Blocks Collection: Presents

Project Description: Your Story is a book like no other.

It's the story you always wanted to read, the story you always wanted to create. Any story you want. Your Story is your imagination projected within the pages, to tell a story today, and another tomorrow.

The idea:

I was playing with a dot on a canvas, when I recognized the first symbol. In the end, writing is not different from drawing. So I generated another. And another. That's how I realized that I had discovered a new language. As a writer, I knew what I had to do: let this language tell the stories it wants.

Characters in modern alphabets are symbols that, over thousands of years, we aligned on in order to comunicate in written form. Most people can tell which character represents what in the alphabet they're most familiar with. There is no room for imagination anymore in the characters themselves. It's all up to the combination of them. So we form words, sentences, chapters, books.

But imagine now a language that no one understands. Every interpretation of it is valid: there is no wrong answer. Anyone reading it is perceiving a different story, creating a different story. It's your own choice. You can decide to change the story at every reading. Or keep a piece of it consistent. Collaborate with others to create a new story.

Your Story is giving back full imagination to you.

How it works:

I wanted Your Story to look like a book, and all pieces of the algorithm follow this aesthetic direction. The aspect ratio is set to √2:1, as most of the paper sizes available worldwide (ISO 216, ISO 217 and ISO 269). Two set tokens (first and last) are the cover and the blurb. The remaining tokens form the interior, using token ID to determine whether the page is left or right and the respective margins. The hash is used to determine the aesthetics of the page: the character style, the type of page (chapter header, illustration, normal text), the presence of notes, and highlights. All character styles have clear differences between them, and occasionally they are all mixed together. Your Story is not meant to be a single alphabet, but rather an exploration of the imagination. Different character styles may evoke different thoughts.