i spoke to allison parrish about my enquiry with living messages.
we spoke about how the letters were simply standing in for shapes — i could’ve used shapes to communicate the same feeling — and then discussed the validity of the notion that text may be used as an image.
she also made me realise that it’s okay for a project to die, and that you may not find many people who share the same curiosity as you.
she gave me a bunch of readings, so that i am familiar with the historical roots that this kind of work emerged from. i am excited to get into these:
my syllabus: https://cll.decontextualize.com/
Concrete Poetry: A World View (on ubuweb) bpNichol: First Screening (video on youtube) Aram Saroyan (you have my copy of Complete Minimal Poems) Chris Joseph
more readings… if you get a web page that says you don’t have access, use the NYU library proxy:
Borsuk, Amaranth. “The Upright Script: Words in Space and on the Page.” Journal of Electronic Publishing, vol. 14, no. 2, Oct. 2011. quod.lib.umich.edu, https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0014.212.
D’Ambrosio, Matteo. “The Early Computer Poetry and Concrete Poetry.” MATLIT: Materialities of Literature, vol. 6, no. 1, Aug. 2018, pp. 51–72. https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/matlit/article/view/2182-8830_6-1_4/4785
Eve, Martin Paul. “New Leaves: Riffling the History of Digital Pagination.” Book History, vol. 25, no. 2, 2022, pp. 479–502. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2022.0017.
Johnston, David (Jhave). “The Assimilation of Text by Image.” Electronic Book Review, 7 Oct. 2012, http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/the-assimilation-of-text-by-image/.
Leeuwen, Theo van, and Emilia Djonov. “Notes towards a Semiotics of Kinetic Typography.” Social Semiotics, vol. 25, no. 2, Mar. 2015, pp. 244–53. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2015.1010324.
Li, Chen. “Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry in Chinese Characters.” The Translation and Transmission of Concrete Poetry, edited by John Corbett and Ting Huang, 1st ed., Routledge, 2019, pp. 56–70. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315145563.
Reed, Anthony. “Broken Witness: Concrete Poetry and a Poetics of Unsaying.” Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 27–58. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/book.35553.
might also want to poke around the Electronic Literature Collection https://collection.eliterature.org/