Description

In reflecting on the ways that I've come to define myself, I started thinking through the lens of my values and different quotes that have given shape to the way that I think. However, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to pinpoint an exact definition for myself because, like with most everyone, it’s something that’s always changing — the things that I value and the ways that I think always seem to be ebbing and flowing as I learn more and experience new things. (I think back to senior year of high school and remember thinking I had a pretty good sense of who I was and thinking I was pretty set in my ways, but now four years later, it amazes me how much has changed and how much those priorities have shifted.) For these reasons, I find discrete labels kind of limiting, so that amorphous definition of who I am is something that I value in my identity. Here, I wanted to play on the idea of which values have stuck with me and which have just passed through.

Process

After identifying a number of quotes I'd found influential at one point or another, I concatenated each of them into one long string. I wanted to play on the idea of the “ebb and flow” of these ideas and decided to go with the idea of a literary waterfall. To give the illusion of falling water, I randomly colored each letter a different shade of blue and constrained the x-coordinate of each letter to a fluctuating value between left-right boundaries. Then, I took a photo of my hands in a cupped position and cropped the negative space using Photoshop.

Last, I implemented the word wall, such that each letter that came within a certain radius of the hands (your cursor) gets concatenated to the final display. Sometimes, the letters come out a bit jumbled, reflecting the fluid nature of these values.