meanderings

The following scripts generate random names, vocabularies, kung-fu moves, creatures, spells, and so on. Most people use them in role-playing games. Some people use them in designing their own SF/Fantasy languages.

In this study, we reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns.

Né en 2005, le Blog Design & Typo est une de mes plus belles aventures à la fois sentimentale et culturelle. Ce qui au départ, ne devait être qu’un support de cours pour mes élèves d’e-art sup, s’est très vite transformé en une expérience de partage de culture majeure.

The majority of typographic experiments I have conducted thus far fall into three categories: intra-letter shape manipulations; inter-letter transitions; and three-dimensional spatial explorations.

“What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness,” — Raj Chakrabarti, Herschel Rabitz, Stacey Springs and George McLendon

nihilartikel, a deliberately fake entry in a reference work

“a kind of personal typographic diary”

‘I come to my studio every day at 10.30, and I stay and do nothing. I go to Paris sometimes. I have a few ideas. To be very pretentious, sometimes I believe it is mystical. Sometimes you find nothing, and then you find some-thing you love to do. Sometimes you make mistakes, but some-times it’s true. In two minutes, you understand what you must do for the next two years. Sometimes it’s in the studio, but other times it’s walking in the street or reading a magazine. It’s a good life, being an artist, because you do what you want.”

In the last decades of the 20th century many writers have been interested in the expressional possibilities offered by the democratization of the moving image, especially by the video media. One result from this is the video poetry developed, among others, by E.M. Melo e Castro, Richard Kostelanetz and Arnaldo Antunes from the 60’s onwards. If one were to trace a thorough history of the virtual textual motion, the tradition of video and multimedia poetry should be taken into consideration. On the other hand, it could also be fruitful to examine how video artists have experimented with the so-called natural language and linguistic articulation. Here I’m thinking especially of Gary Hill

“The Web was built upon principles of universality,” says Berners-Lee. “So any person on any device should be able to make use of any kind of data and access any kind of information. Our stated goal is to lead the Web to its full potential – that’s not a place but a direction, and our work is focused on trying to find the right direction.”

Gnarls Barkley, “Whos Gonna Save My Soul”

Précis: The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an interactive online artwork which allows one to create and evolve the possible writing systems of one’s own imaginary civilizations. The abstract alphabets produced by the Machine can be downloaded as PC-format TrueType fonts, and are entered into a comprehensive archive of user creations. The products of the Machine probe the liminal territories between familiarity and chaos, language and gesture.

Poetry interests me above all as a kind of resistence. In the first place because its economy is absolutely aberrant to contemporary logic: an enormous investment (in terms of time and energy), quasi-nil effect and zero profitability. So it’s an act that could only be directed by internal necessity…

That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty—the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one—that makes it impossible to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

This is a haiku
It is about erasers
I didn’t bring one

“micro-facial leakage”

Broken Jaw (2006)
Concrete, enamel paint,vinyl lettering. Sculpture: 70 x 60 x 50cm. Text dimensions variable.