User:Lucia Dossin/Thematic Seminars/Politics of Craft

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Retro Analog Nostalgia

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/udam2/a-memory-between-us-a-postcard-kit-when-you-travel

Print Cake

Presented at V2 from June 24 to June 29 2014, News from Nowhere exhibition

Description

Print Cake is an installation/performance where cupcakes are decorated with a snippet of William Morris' News from Nowhere printed on edible paper and edible ink and sold for customers/visitors.

There are two kinds of cupcakes: the standard and the customized. The former costs less than the latter. For the customized version, customers choose a color and a word, through a simple interface (a one-page website running on full screen browser without navigation bars). The word generates a snippet of text (taken from News from Nowhere). This text is placed onto a designed template and in combination with the chosen color is printed on edible paper and placed on top of the cupcake. In the standard version no choices are possible – they all have the same color and just a few variations on the text snippets.

Sketch

Table-sketch.png

Design

Print templates

The ornament was designed by Artyom Kocharyan for this exhibition.

System

Orders

Front end

Back end

Database

#code from stackoverflow by Haymond Hettinger
from re import finditer
from itertools import tee, islice, izip, chain, repeat

file = open('pg3261.txt', 'r') 
#News from Nowhere in txt format, downloaded from gutenberg.org

text = file.read()


def kwic(text, tgtword, width=10):
    #'Find all occurrences of tgtword and show the surrounding context'
    matches = (mo.span() for mo in finditer(r"[A-Za-z\'\-]+", text))
    padded = chain(repeat((0,0), width), matches, repeat((-1,-1), width))
    t1, t2, t3 = tee((padded), 3)
    t2 = islice(t2, width, None)
    t3 = islice(t3, 2*width, None)
    for (start, _), (i, j), (_, stop) in izip(t1, t2, t3):
        if text[i: j] == tgtword:
            context = text[start: stop]
            yield context

#print list(kwic(text, 'pleasure'))
#instead of simply printing, I printed in SQL syntax so that I could easily run a SQL INSERT INTO directly in PHPMyAdmin to populate the DB

lista = kwic(text, 'pleasure')
iterator = 245 
#last ID in the DB

f1 = open('sqlfile.txt', 'w+')

for item in lista:
    str_it = str(iterator)
	f1.write( "(" + str_it +  ", 'pleasure', :'" + item + "')," )
	iterator = iterator +1
	
f1.close()

Photos