kinetic text

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 Scripting Reading Motions, Manuel Portela explores the expressive use of book forms and programmable media in experimental works of both print and electronic literature and finds a self-conscious play with the dynamics of reading and writing. Portela examines a series of print and digital works by Johanna Drucker, Mark Z. Danielewski, Rui Torres, Jim Andrews, and others, for the insights they yield about the semiotic and interpretive actions through which readers produce meaning when interacting with codes. Analyzing these works as embodiments and simulations of the motions of reading, Portela pays particular attention to the ways in which awareness of eye movements and haptic interactions in both print and electronic media feeds back onto the material and semantic layers of the works. These feedbacks, he argues, sustain self-reflexive loops that link the body of the reader to the embodied work. Readers’ haptic actions and eye movements coinstantiate the object that they are reading. Portela discusses typographic and graphic marks as choreographic notations for reading movements; examines digital recreations of experimental print literary artifacts; considers reading motions in kinetic and generated texts; analyzes the relationship of bibliographic, linguistic, and narrative coding in Danielewski’s novel-poem, Only Revolutions; and describes emergent meanings in interactive textual instruments. The expressive use of print and programmable media, Portela shows, offers a powerful model of the semiotic, interpretive, and affective operations embodied in reading processes. (Source: The MIT Press)

This paper is proposed as the second part of an essay, the first part of which was presented at DAC'98, having the overall title 'Performances of Writing in the Age of Digital Transliteration'. Part one of this essay raised questions -- contextualized by reference to Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler, amongst others -- concerning the intrinsically digital characteristics of text, along with certain implications of these characteristics (and what they have entailed, specifically and especially: the Net) for traditional literary culture, for the latter's critique, and for textual, especially artistic textual practices.

Whereas the first part engaged digital characteristics of textuality, this second is more concerned with practices themselves and theories of those practices. The first part argued that although inscribed textuality provides a, perhaps 'the,' paradigm of 'the digital,' it has, in traditional literary culture, been less susceptible to the varieties of (algorithmic) programming which works in digital media invite (because of their very structure). Despite this, 'programming' is proposed as both a more comprehensive and more accurate term, compared with, for example, 'authorship' or 'composition,' when setting out to indicate and characterize existing, potential and even traditional textual practices.

'Programming' operates here in the sense of an intrinsically provisional practice of inscription, prior to publication in whatever media; it is the detailed announcement of a performance which may soon take place (on the screen, in the mind); it is an indication of what to read and how. This sense of programming is poised to reconfigure the process of writing and *incorporate* programming in its technical sense, making it an inalienable part of textual practice. In fact, programming has subsumed writing *progressively*, as the paratextual features of textual art have become increasingly programmable by writers:- from the arrangement of programmatological atoms (letters) in syntactic sequences, to their layout (as in generalized page design), to more specialized spatial arrangements (as in visual poetry); through hypertextual orderings; algorithmic text generation; and kinetic textual performance. Writers are always already programmers.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

This thesis is about the poetic edge of language and technology. It inter-relates both computational creation and poetic reception by analysing typographic animation softwares and meditating (speculatively) on a future malleable language that possesses the quality of being (and is implicitly perceived as) alive. As such it is a composite document: a philosophical and practice-based exploration of how computers are transforming literature, an ontological meditation on life and language, and a contribution to software studies. Digital poetry introduces animation, dimensionality and metadata into literary discourse. This necessitates new terminology; an acronym for Textual Audio-Visual Interactivity is proposed: Tavit. Tavits (malleable digital text) are tactile and responsive in ways that emulate living entities. They can possess dimensionality, memory, flocking, kinematics, surface reflectivity, collision detection, and responsiveness to touch, etc…. Life-like tactile tavits involve information that is not only semantic or syntactic, but also audible, imagistic and interactive. Reading mediated language-art requires an expanded set of critical, practical and discourse tools, and an awareness of the historical continuum that anticipates this expansion. The ontological and temporal design implications of tavits are supported with case-studies of two commercial typographic-animation softwares and one custom software (Mr Softie created at OBX Labs, Concordia) used during a research-creation process.