Beyond the Veil is a project inspired by Shakepeare’s Sonnet 1. Fantasy sonnets seep into harsh realities, all written in iambic pentameter across numerous scrolls. Step into the shoes of vampires, mermaids, centaurs and more as you discover the chaos the human race has unleashed on this Earth. Each poem, seven in total, is meant to critique different issues in society that deal with climate change.
The process of making the poems started with a brainstorming session to get ideas in pairing fantasy creatures with different societal issues. After this, a poem would be drafted and plugged into Bing’s GPT-4 to be transformed into Shakesparean. Then would come the hardest part, the validation. Using manual methods, I checked for proper usage of iambic pentameter. Many of the poems that GPT-4 wrote had to be tweaked for either syllable count or wrong rhyming scheme. These issues were fixed with both manual writing and prompt engineering. The last step of this process was creating a scroll to display the poems in Photoshop. Along with the poem, two images would be placed on the scroll. One image would depict the incident recounted in the poem, while the other would depict an illuminated manuscript letter. These images were made with Bing’s DALL-E 3. Once all the images and poems were displayed on the scrolls, I uploaded them onto a website for the world to see. Coded in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, I coded a display for the scrolls with a next and back button. I also added an audio feature with ElevenLabs that narrates each poem. From here, the site was complete and ready to be published to the public.