kinetic typography

This paper traces the development of a new semiotic mode, kinetic typography. Kinetic typography began with the experiments of filmmakers like Len Lye and Norman McLaren. Later, film title designers like Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro drew on the shapes of letters with inventive metaphors – serifs, for instance could make letters walk, because they can stand for shoes as they are elongated horizontals on which something stands. In Saul Bass’ titles for Hitchcock's Psycho, the splitting of letters became a metaphor for the split mind of the film's main character. Such inventions eventually became part of a lexicon of clichés drawn on by designers across the world. Eventually, researchers and software designers began to formalize and systematize the language of kinetic typography, and the fruit of their work is now widely available, not only to specialists, but also to anyone who uses PowerPoint or Adobe AfterEffects, even though users may not always be aware of the lexico-grammatical rules which underlie the menus they choose from. And computers, being agnostic as to the kind of “objects” their operations operate on, apply these grammars to letters as well as other graphic forms, thus consolidating the multimodality of the language of movement. The second part of the paper discusses these formalizations, drawing on the kinetic design literature. Based on M.A.K. Halliday's transitivity theory, it sketches the outlines of a systemic grammar of movement that can make the meaning potential of kinetic typography explicit. The paper concludes with an analysis of art works created by David Byrne which use PowerPoint as a medium. Using PowerPoint's relatively simple movement grammar, Byrne has nevertheless succeeded in using movement creatively, giving us a glimpse of a future of creative writing which has kinetic typography at its very centre.

(Source: Authors' Abstract)

In the 1980s, the world saw the introduction of personal computers (PCs). While the first creative stage of electronic literature took advantage of mainframe computers, only accessible in institutional environments, the context in which Silvestre Pestana created his first computer poems was totally different – a new wave Pedro Barbosa sarcastically calls “poesia doméstica” [domestic poetry] (1996: 147). With personal computers, Silvestre Pestana programmed in BASIC, first for a Sinclair ZX81, and then, already with chromatic lighting, for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, three poems respectively dedicated to Henri Chopin, E. M. de Melo e Castro and Julian Beck, which resulted in the Computer Poetry (1981-83) series. Pestana, a visual artist, writer and performer – who had returned from the exile in Sweden after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 – brought diverse influences put forward with photography, video, performance, and computer media. From his creative production, it should be emphasized the iconic conceptual piece Povo Novo [New People] (1975), which was remediated by the author himself in the referred series of kinetic visual poems, “video-computer-poems” (Pestana 1985: 205) or “infopoems” (Melo e Castro 1988: 57). By operating almost like TV scripts, the series oscillates between recognizable shapes – such as the oval and the larger animated Lettrist shapes, formed by the small-sized words “ovo” (egg), “povo” (people), “novo” (new), “dor” (pain) and “cor” (color) – and the reading interpretation of the words themselves: “ovo,” the unity, but also the potential; “povo,” the collective, the indistinct, the mass; “novo” and “cor/dor.” This play of relations translates the new consciousness, although painful, of a “new people” in a new historic, social and artistic period, one of freedom and action. In an interview, Pestana (2011) claimed having researched more than thirty languages, only to find in Portuguese the possibility of traversing the singular and the plural, the individual and the collective, the past, present and future, by just dislocating a letter: ovo/(p)ovo/(n)ovo.

(Source: Author's text)

Roda Lume is a 2’ 43’’ videopoem, which was broadcast by the Rádio Televisão Portuguesa (RTP) in 1969 and subsequently destroyed by the station itself, and was reenacted by Melo e Castro from the original storyboard in 1986. The work is indeed surprising, as a poem that overlaps text, kinetic text, image, moving image and sound, anticipating and influencing various genres of digital hypermedia poetry mainly launched after the birth of the World Wide Web. It constructs a different notion of space-time, opening a “visual time” (Melo e Castro 1993: 238) of unfolding images and text that comprises a new reading perception.

(Source: Author's text)