As part of a data visualisation course in 3rd year Tech Art, we had to explore data comparison through a creative and artistic lens. The project focused on analysing several End User License Agreements (EULAs), those legal texts we accept every day by clicking "I agree" without actually reading them. The aim was to highlight their length, complexity and sometimes absurdity, while staying true to the data and its meaning.
We were given the EULAs of several software tools commonly used in the video game industry, and we were free to choose our own comparison criteria. Some students analysed the presence of legal clauses; others focused on word frequency. My partner and I chose to compare the length of the texts. The difference was striking between the EULAs of open-source software like Blender and those of large companies like Adobe. Some documents are so long and complex they seem designed to discourage reading. Once we had defined our angle, we needed to find a visual way to represent that disproportion.
We wanted to depict these texts not as simple blocks of words, but as a fluid material, something we consume without knowing what it contains. The idea was to turn each EULA into a liquid whose quantity reflects its length: the denser and more complex the text, the greater the volume. This approach let us highlight how large organisations invite us to accept opaque conditions almost automatically, without measuring what we are truly "ingesting" when we click I agree.
We chose to work in Blender for this project. My partner handled the art direction: she designed and modelled the environment in which the texts would be visualised. I was responsible for generating and simulating the word rain. The advantage of an animation over an interactive project is that performance constraints differ: once the final render is produced, it does not matter if each frame took several minutes to calculate. I was therefore able to push my computer to its limits to achieve a simulation as faithful as possible to our data.
It was important to represent each EULA at the same scale. Originally, I wanted to drop every single word into the glasses. For relatively short texts like Krita's (around 500 words) or even Blender's (around 2,000 words), that remained feasible. However, for Adobe's EULA (over 45,000 words) or Autodesk's (nearly 60,000 words), the amount of geometry generated became far too heavy. To make the project workable, I reduced the sample by keeping only one word in ten, while preserving the proportions between the different texts. Even so, the Python script that generated the 3D word meshes took over 45 minutes to process the Autodesk file.
I was keen to use the actual words from the texts, without artificial simplification. This produced some surprising results: some EULAs contain extremely long web links, which appear in the simulation as vertical rods detaching from the rest of the textual liquid. These visual anomalies are a reminder that behind the apparent legal neutrality, these documents sometimes hide unexpected — even absurd — elements.