Art meets hip-hop meets new technology meets faaaaaaabulous fashion in Roopa Vasudevan‘s new exhibit “Grillz.” From I can gather, these gold grillz were printed using an algorithm from rap songs. The shapes were determined by the references to extreme poverty and extreme wealth, making the golden mouthpieces visual representations of the songs.
“Grillz” is an exploration and analysis of the usage of language in mainstream hip-hop lyricism, with particular attention paid to mentions of money and income. Individual songs are algorithmically analyzed for references to extreme poverty—the projects, drug dealing, prostitution—as well as extreme wealth—cars, cash, jewelry and the like. Mentions in each category are scored according to relative distance from words of the opposite polarity, and the resulting landscape formed is extruded into a 3D shape and printed as wearable grills: jewelry designed to fit over one’s teeth, and which have become inextricably linked to hip-hop culture over the years as a symbol of over-the-top, ostentatious wealth.
The language was processed using the pygenius python library, and the models were created in processing, with the assistance of the geomerative and modelbuilder libraries. The pieces were 3D printed in polished gold steel.
“Office Hours” was at the DUMBO Arts Festival (Brooklyn) last month and this month at “Heavily Scripted” at Little Berlin (Philadelphia).
(via We the Urban)
The post 3D-Printed Grillz Created Using Hip-Hop Algorithms appeared first on World of Wonder.