Jan 05, 2025 07:00:00

'Silent Poems' turns entered text into moving art

Silent Poems is a digital art project that can be accessed from your browser. When you enter text into a simple website, the text is transformed into abstract animated symbols. Different combinations of letters create different art connections, and even if you enter the same characters, the design changes subtly, so you can have fun turning specific strings of characters into art.

Silent Poems

https://silentpoems.net/

The Silent Poems page looks like this. It has a simple design with only an input area and a '?' button.

Clicking on the '?' button displayed a description of the site. Silent Poems was created by Lavinia Petrache, an animator based in Switzerland, and was inspired by several text messages, with the concept of 'a statement about the shortcomings of our communication with others, or with ourselves.' The animation is programmed in JavaScript, and patterns are displayed according to the characters you enter, so if you train yourself, you can read the characters from the animation.

I actually tried entering characters. Only the alphabet is supported, and symbols other than hiragana, kanji, numbers, and spaces cannot be entered. Below is the result of entering 26 letters from A to Z in order.

Next, I tried typing 'GIGAZINE' three times in a row. Since there are 10 characters per line and no line breaks, I put two spaces after the first and second lines. As you can see below, the same characters have similar patterns, but the colors and movements are slightly different.

You can enter up to 7 lines and a total of 70 characters. Once you have freely entered the text and created the animation, you can save the art you created by right-clicking and clicking 'Save Image As'. Below are the steps to save in Google Chrome.

Once you have decided on the file name, click 'Save.'

The following PNG file was saved. On the Silent Poems page, the characters you enter become animated art, but at the time of writing, only PNG format can be saved.

You can follow Petrache creating art with Silent Poemsd on his Instagram.