What does it feel like to hold a thought together?

A sentence floats apart on the screen. The player can only keep it whole by holding on. Letting go is not failure. It is just what thoughts do.

The sketch takes the first line of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

In the novel, a whole day and a whole life unfold from that line. Here the words drift like thoughts on water, set in a minimal pixel typeface.

The same sentence can be read in English, Chinese or Japanese, and each language breaks it into different pieces.

1. 01

   Drift

   Words float apart on a pale page. Nothing is in order.

2. 02

   Gathering

   Holding the button, the player pulls the words in. They line up as the sentence, trailing behind like a thought being followed.

3. 03

   Release

   Letting go, everything scatters. It is not a failure, just a mind moving on, and the player can begin again.

Holding on became a line. Collected words link up behind the cursor in the order of the sentence, joined by thin strokes, and fall apart the moment the player lets go. The feeling that came out of it is how fragile attention is.

sentences{}

The opening line in English, Chinese and Japanese, split into words.

loadWords() / resetWords()

Builds the floating words for the chosen language and scatters them again.

mouseDragged()

Collects any floating word the cursor passes over.

draw()

Floats the loose words, then chains the collected ones behind the cursor in sentence order and draws lines between them.

mousePressed() / mouseReleased()

Language buttons on press. Release scatters the words.

// collected words, in the order of the original sentence
let chain = [];
for (let target of wordList) {
  let found = words.find(w => w.text === target && w.collected);
  if (found) chain.push(found);
}

// each word follows the one in front of it; the first follows the cursor
for (let i = 0; i < chain.length; i++) {
  let word = chain[i];
  let target = i === 0 ? { x: mouseX, y: mouseY } : chain[i - 1];
  let angle = atan2(target.y - word.y, target.x - word.x);
  let desiredX = target.x - cos(angle) * 40;
  let desiredY = target.y - sin(angle) * 40;
  word.x = lerp(word.x, desiredX, 0.1);
  word.y = lerp(word.y, desiredY, 0.1);
}

// a thin line ties the thought together
stroke(80);
for (let i = 0; i < chain.length - 1; i++) {
  line(chain[i].x, chain[i].y, chain[i + 1].x, chain[i + 1].y);
}

Condensed from the original for reading. The order is read from the sentence, not from when the words were picked up.

Full source on OpenProcessing ↗The embedded sketch above also has a Code tab with the complete source.

See the method behind the series →