Out of the rappers analyzed and with mentions of: Bali, Brooklyn, Cali, Capri, Chi-Town, Detroit, England, France, Hollywood, Japan, London, St. Bart, Switzerland & Tokyo – Jay-Z’s “Around The World” was the song with the most geo-locations.
That long arc on the left is made from the drama of moving along 3 distant paths: “40/40′s out in Tokyo” from the song Do U Wanna Ride, “Don’t cry for me Argentina” from the song American Gangster and “Schooled me with hard knocks, better than Berkeley” from the song Hello Brooklyn 2.0.
Inspired by Pablo Picasso’s light pen drawings Maximum Distance. Minimum Displacement. uses abstracted semantic rap data to create sculptural forms with light. The forms represent the distance travelled by the lyrics in each song.
(Brief) Methodology: I used the Hip Hop Word Count’s new semantic analysis results to extract all geographic mentions from the complete bodies of work of 12 rappers. These locations were translated into geo coordinates which were then made into points that plotted the robot arm’s movements. The robot arm drew each path while holding a light pen.
