I love a good challenge, and last night I presented myself with a most delightful dilemma. As you've seen from my previous posts, I've created a stockpile of obscuro graphic tees to thoroughly confuse the unsuspecting public. And with the plethora of imagery available from the avant-garde and cult cinema, I could go on forever printing these tees. But I'd never be able to wear them all.
And so I set myself the challenge - to conceive and implement the ultimate hip tee - a single design which sums up all of my specializes interests. The Grand Unified Theory of Hip.
And then it came to me. What better way to showcase my academic pretension, my musico-cultural obsession, and my meta-hip snobbishness than with an autobiographical custom tee emblazoned with a Fruchterman-Reingold graph depicting the web-like interrelationships between my 60 favorite sub and micro genres?
I quickly constructed a dataset of my favorite musical niches and formatted them as a CSV denoting each node and edge for the graphic. (For example: Post-Punk is an amalgam of elements from funk, dub, electronic, and experimental musics.)
I was pleased to discover that my favorite data visualization application, Gephi was supported by Linux, and in a short time I produced this splendid graph. Behold, ladies and gentlemen: The Grand Unified Theory of Hip.
Click here for a hi-res raster image.
Forum-friendly thumbnail:
