Source Note The material and flow of this post is derived directly from a lecture by Jason Lewis of OBXLabs in his University of Concordia Typography class. October 21/08. It charts a very broad course through typographic innovators who actively worked in both advertising and design prototyping from the earliest emergence of widescale digital typography.…

Eduardo Kac like Melo e Castro and Augusto de Campos, was there at the birth of videopoem. His first work Não! was released in the same year as the de Campos digitalized ‘Pluvial…Fluvial”. Online versions of Kac’s work are available. Ticker tape parades of neologisms, letter growing into space, rhythmic motion. The seeds of vector…

Since 1970, Alan Sondheim has been playing with 3D. A visit to his website http://www.alansondheim.org/ –which is less website than a low-tech bulk online server-list of the contents of Sondheim’s eccentric yet consistent art-research output– reveals an astonishing array of diverse unsorted and unsearchable materials spanning decades. Sifting through the links is akin to searching…

One of the pioneers of utilization of computers for creating a visual concrete poetry effect according to Funkhouser in Prehistoric Digital Poetry is Lillian F. Schwartz. Schwartz is typical of an early innovator, she is primarily an explorative artist who made contributions to vision theory, many documentary films as well as creating this poetic work.…

Jackson Mac Low is a poet who worked like a computer before computers, and after computers arrived began to use them to implement algorithmic methods he had already been doing by hand. From 1962-1968, he composed 22 Light Poems [2] without a computer. The poems are all combinatorial and loosely composed upon algorithmic method, sometimes…

Talks that began in 1965 culminated in an exhibit entitled “Computers and the Arts” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1968 with the intention of dealing broadly with the demonstration of how man can use the computer and new technology to extend his creativity and inventiveness (p.3) The catalogue opens with an essay…

1964: Jean Baudot, a pioneering engineer-linguist, creates the first French machine-generated published poetry. Published by the Editions du Jour in Montreal,”La machine à écrire mise en marche et programmée par Jean A. Baudot” (“A Writing Machine created and programmed by Jean A. Baudot”) is still circa 2008 available (mildewed and seemingly unread since 1976) in…

Marc Adrian was one of the artists featured in the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit at ICA in 1974. Prior to this he had constructed films which were based on procedural workings (what he called “methodic inventionism”). His method eventually expanded into working with text processed by computers. He is considered one of the pioneers of film…

Funkhouser’s timeline includes: “Clair Philippy (USA), “blank verse at the rate of 150 words a minute” 5 poems published in Electronic Age.” Only a few feeble trickle references exist to this work online. No residue of the actual output exists. Time has coherently erased all but the shadow of it’s existence. Every cultural precursor is…

Reports vary on where it was first popularized (Funkhouser says Time magazine, a blog suggests Horizon magazine) but sometime in 1962, a subdivision of a computer company called the Laboratory for Automata Research of the Librascope Division of General Precision, Inc led by R.M. Worthy had their research popularized. “Librascope engineers, concerned with the problem…