Keramikos is an interactive piece and a study of typography originally coded in Processing before being converted to p5.js for the web. I wanted to capture the versatile, handmade, and down-to-earth qualities of ceramics in a newer, less "down-to-earth" medium—coding. In the process, however, I realized that coding is very much a "handmade" process, adding to and cutting away from the work (or code) in the same manner of a ceramicist or sculptor.
In a 2x2 grid, each quadrant features two ceramics from a country or region. Hovering over each quadrant changes the background color, and clicking on each quadrant reveals another ceramic from that country or region. The silhouettes reference ceramics from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and were created in Adobe Illustrator. The texture of each silhouette was created using screenshots of Google Maps satellite views of each ceramic’s country of origin. The type for “Egypt” was created in Processing.
Google Maps
When deciding what the contents of the composition of the poster was going to be, I remembered the unique textures that were found in Google Maps. So, I randomly zoomed into various parts of Google Maps, keeping note of the coordinates. The textures I came across reminded me of ceramics because they evoked earthy, mineral, sandy, or clay-like qualities. From this, I decided to focus on four countries and/or regions: Egypt, China, Mexico, and England.
I gave these textures form by silhouetting them with ceramics from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection (using their Open Access image collection).
