typography

Part of Tsead Bruinja's poetry collection 'Overwoekerd.' Students of Artez created animations for the poem, for which they experimented with typography, image, sounds, interaction and typography.

You Say Time is a River is a locative, digital poetry collection, created and currated by Maria Barnas for the AMC Kunststichting (Academic Medical Center Art Foundation).

Anyone who is in a waiting room, lives in her own special time zone. For some, time goes by slowly, for others, time pulsate like a stroboscope. Maria Barnas created poems for the Emergency Room of the AMC Hospital that open up a spaces where the different timelines of the visitors are made accessible.

Four monitors are placed in a row on the wall. As you walk closer an exhaled breath is heard, then a mouse click, a sigh. A voice commands, “then drag up”; a different voice, “like this”. Excerpts of Youtube typography tutorials populate the screens, complete with Photoshop, Maya, Illustrator, GIMP, etc. interfaces along with the type that is being carefully constructed. A rhythm emerges, “Rotate left, pull down, move forward, like that”. In this piece, a multimodal digital poem forms from the aural language of making visual language. Fragments of descriptive phrases are heard over looping patterns of mouse clicks, exhales, sighs and keyboard strokes amplifying the language of micro-gestures. The unseen role of the body in the circuit of human-computer interaction is ever present in this installation exposing the analog labor of creating digital type and the articulation of the physical process of making digital words. The work humorously explores the physicality of creating visual communication and calls attention to the human, social and cognitive labor behind the typography we take for granted in our daily lives. This digital poem employs a methodology and software developed over the last year as a Fellow in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. It is a methodology that enables linguistic analysis of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across multiple monitors. Using a corpus of over two hundred tutorial videos, the software parses user defined complex language patterns, parts of speech analysis and phonetic information, creating new aesthetic possibilities for digital poets working with a large corpus of multimedia files.

The Word Made Flesh and its immediate predecessor, Through Light and the Alphabet, were both made as distinct formulations in response to theoretical issues in writing and ecriture. Both address the status of materiality in visual presentation of poetic work. Both are direct responses to the work of Jacques Derrida, and also, to the dictates and orthodoxies of many of the California Language Poets whose work and lives had been so intimately bound to mine. The typographic format of the Word Made Flesh was meant to trip the eye, return one constantly to the plane of discourse, of material production. I made this book, and Through Light and the Alphabet, out of complete love of letters. Probably more than any other of my books, these two are absolute celebrations of the beauty and expressive capability of type.

(Source: Author)

Zang Tumb Tumb was Marinetti's first published collection of parole in libertà (words in liberty), a form of poetry at the same time verbal and visual. Begun in 1912 and published in 1914, the work is an account of Marinetti's experience of the Siege of Adrianople (now Edirne, Turkey) during the Balkan War of 1912, which he covered as a war correspondent. The title Zang Tumb Tumb evokes the sounds of mechanized war—artillery shelling, bombs, explosions.

(Source: MoMA)