Category: conceptual

  • Silicon Speech Shape

    By modelling the geometric resonance of speech, visually expressive letterforms emerge. The advantages of light emitting screens rather than reflective paper are obvious: all the features of the letterform can modulate as sounded. Diaphragm, trachea, larynx, tongue, palette, lips: tubes that resonate to create resonance. Language landscapes labyrinth lingual. New letterforms grown from formulas. Coral…

  • Visual Language (Encyclopedia Pictura)

    In my thesis, I state: “I think visual language evolution is on a trajectory toward becoming a real-world object. The shape of these letterform objects might correspond to embodied structures: visual analogs of mathematics that arise from the acoustic resonance inside our bodies. It can be argued that much of proportional aesthetics (theories of golden…

  • Genetic Initiatives

    As far as I know, there have been 4 primary interventions that involve directly writing poetry into genes. The first was renegade bio-artist Joe Davis’ Microvenus project. He wrote an an ancient fertility glyph into an e coli in 1996 and exhibited it at Ars Electronica 2000. For this he invented his own coding structure.…

  • Living Language

    Richard Rorty identified philosophy as a series of turns. Like the head of a small bird, the head of philosophy pivots around to find new concerns each generation. In the early twentieth century, Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn precipitated a concentration on language as fundamental metaphor. In 1994, the pictorial turn (of W.T.J. Mitchell) proposed a visual…

  • TAVIT: Text Audio-Visual Interactivity

    Digital poetry is a multimedia hybrid-art-form, a subset of visual language fusing with digital technology, increasingly mediated by networks. Contemporary poems are animated interfaces; and they often utilize dynamic interactive typography superimposed over video, generative or 3D environments. A brief list of the disciplines involved: visual art, sound composition, literature, media studies, computer programming. Multimedia-hybrid…

  • 2009 : David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein

    As a meta-monument, a monolith, to the confluence of philosophy and poetry, and an extended meditation on the convergence of thought in multimedia, David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein is a rapturous virtuosic sprawling labyrinth that confounds, nourishes and provokes. It is (in my view) a consummate example of hybrid interactivity, future cinema, net-art and…

  • An Image-Essay on Image-Texts

  • 2012: Against Against

    Lev Manovich inverts the conventional way of looking at how photography forced a change on painting: “Thus, rather than thinking of modern art as a liberation (from representation and documentation), we can see it as a kind of psychosis – an intense, often torturous examination of the contents of its psyche, the memories of its…

  • 1926 Marcel Duchamp – Anemic Cinema

    The spinning wheel[1] is fundamental to both hard-drives and to Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 film Anemic Cinema, an early example of animated text. In Anemic Cinema[2] phrases painted in spirals onto a flat disk  rotate at constant speed. The reader reads inward from the edge to the phrase’s end near the spinning centre. This process evokes…