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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…
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2000 – ? : Dreaming Methods
Like the tentacles or root system of a macabre plant, Dreaming Methods (a website developed by programmer-poet Andy Campbell often with primary collaborator/partner videographer Judi Alston) distributes audacious and sensual digital fiction thru multiple media: browsers, apps and pdfs. Its vision is disturbing yet never horrific: conspiracy theories, incest, suicides, rape, dreams, runaways, amnesiacs. Brooding soundscapes. Destabilizing…
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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…
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2008: Karsten Schmidt: programmable typography
Post-Spectacular studio, directed by Karsten Schmidt, in 2008 developed a dimensional typography Type & Form experiment that explores boundaries between animation, code, concrete poetry and sculpture. By synthesizing formal elements with technical skill, Schmidt establishes a benchmark for digital typography. The Type & Form font was grown generatively using a reaction-diffusion model. Pixels migrate into…
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2000: Ben Fry’s Tendril
In the domain of dimensional typography with implications for digital poetry, there are some prescient pioneers. Ben Fry’s (2000) alternative web browser called Tendril sets precedents aesthetically and technically. In Fry’s words: “tendril is a web browser that constructs typographic sculptures from the text content of web pages. the first page of a site is…
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Language: what is it?
Language: what is it? What is this thing we use all the time, that you are reading now, that De Saussure calls a “concrete natural object in the brain”? Is it Burrough’s infamous virus? Possibly. But that’s a way of seeing it that requires a little psychotic torque. Or, is language (take a deep breath…
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Engberg: “Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media”
This (rambling overview) post examines Maria Engberg’s (2007) doctoral thesis: “Born Digital: Writing Poetry in the Age of New Media” for several reasons: first, I found her name referred to on the ELMCIP “Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” website (and since she is one of a handful of principal…
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Karl Kempton’s ‘Kaldron’ & Katue’s ‘Plastic Poetry
The notion of the lived poem (that transfuses through the bones, hops the brain-blood barrier and instigates a transcendent or visceral contact with an alternative way of being) is an ancient one. It’s practitioners tend to be committed to the poem as autonomous, free to escape the rigid confines of discourse or the narrow cage…
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Peter Cho: digital typoTypo(design-po)graphy
Contemporaneously with J. Abbot Miller’s Dimensional Typography, Peter Cho (an award-winning designer who later received a fine arts master from UCLA and a masters of science from MIT) was beginning to release typographic experiments that stretched conceptions of type as a carrier for meaning; the boundaries were stretched digitally with a zen-like precision using programming…
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1996: Dimensional Typographic Poetry
“Dimensional Typography: Case Studies on The Shape of Letters” is a great title I would have loved to have thought of it; it’s also a great book written and conceived by J. Abbott Miller in 1996. I am endebted to the ever-resourceful Jason Lewis for loaning it to me from his library. “Dimensional Typography: Case…