New York based artist and developer Roopa Vasudevan has created a series of 3D printed polished gold steel ‘Grillz’, whose composition and arrangement has been formed from the algorithmic analysis of individual lyrics, with particular attention paid to mentions of money and income.
“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.
