![]() Each a waiting paintbrush.Ĭontemporary adventures in text art involve traditional gallery artists, graphic designers, video game designers, software developers, and animators. 143,000 characters purposefully encoded in every one of our inventions for us to use. Our ability to communicate on the internet depends on Unicode, the international standard for encoding text for every writing system on earth. The air around us is saturated with waves carrying digital text to our devices, and in the code on which they run. ![]() In 2020, branded type screams so often from our clothing the absence of it almost feels like more of a statement than its presence. It is open to motion, animation, or total rigidity-ink on the page, set in stone. By concerning itself with alphabets and language, text art can be deep social and political commentary, attacking propaganda, erasure, and empire. Its cellular nature allows it to be architectural if need be, an art of mosaic. An exacting, methodical superstructure for only the most precise mind. Or it can be a serious extrapolation of scientific or mathematical phenomena. Text art can be childlike, crude, and humorous. It encourages playfulness and imagination: take that open document and instead of homework, draw something with that keyboard. ![]() What I love about text art is that it is accessible, inviting. You have to slam each key with force, turn the platen knob and pull the line space letter in strange patterns in order to move about the page against the machine’s design. Artists like Barbara Krueger and Jenny Holzer used the large scale typeforms of advertising and media to blast political messages from gallery and museum walls.Įven now, if you ever come across a fully manual typewriter, the physical experience of typing, let alone making text art with it, is a sensory joy. As early as the 1960s, digital text became a tool, a medium, and a toy to be wielded for graphic means. Typewriter art flourished once the typewriter spread through the world as a business tool: artists, poets, designers, and experimenters like Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Anni Albers turned it into an orchestra of visual production, painting from the keyboard. Standardized letterforms could be paintbrushes, bricks, sculptures, tiles, pixels, cellular organisms, and ornaments. As soon as writing became standardized “text” through the typeset printing press, artists started making images with these prebuilt shapes.
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