Aphiddd
By Andy Campbell
Aphiddd was inspired, rather fittingly, by another poem I wrote many years ago about a friendship that I felt had become dependent, even parasitic in nature, largely without me even noticing.
The work developed as if the older poem were the ‘host’, the plundered source material – which made for an interesting writing and editing process.
The idea to use photo-scanned plants and materials as part of the work came from spending time outdoors during the autumn/winter months and seeing plants, leaves and barks deteriorating. The colours at times were spectacular and beautiful, despite the nature of what was happening.
Originally, I was looking to create small digital bugs comprised of text which would freely and randomly roam around the sections of tree-bark as you explored the work, but it turned out to be a little too messy and over-complicated to implement.
The poetry runs along ‘splines’ generated through primitive geographical shapes – mostly tori. These are sometimes stretched and overlapped to give a sense than the text is encapsulating or ‘suffocating’ the natural branches and bark sections, often without even touching them.
After being optimized (the original photo scanned textures are 4k, reduced to 2k), the piece was created entirely in Unity and published using WebGL.
