Live Text 2

The importance of a text’s significance is highlighted in the interview with Wadrip-Fruin. During the creation process of artistic pieces that attempt to incorporate textual elements it is essential for the artist to comprehend its possible meanings as well as those that will be create in the creative process. It is possible to harness these human created nuances to affect the final production. Without attention to the essence of texts, unintended meanings may infiltrate artworks. Wadrip-Fruin does not aim to achieve the interaction contemporary artists stride for. He incorporates human behaviour in his work while regarding it as part of the human experience of the rendition. In this type of situation, the variety of experiences with the artwork may in fact change the artist’s perception of the work. With time, the artist hopes greater levels of meaning in regards to textual elements will be possible to attain with computational methods. Computers may simulate an understanding of our language to better penetrate our lives. Works, like those of Wadrip-Fruin, connect with the viewer on many levels. Initially, their installation context suggests a visual reading and scenario. If the interactor maintains interest, he or she may proceed to develop an understanding of certain meanings dissimulated in the words. Finally these combinations encode meanings which are decoded by the user and modified by the latter’s cultural and social background. It seems that one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in text-based art is the public’s perception of text and its significance in such works. Could it be because the inclusion of typographic elements may have been arbitrary in the past? Or maybe the realm of words and phrases is limited in the minds of the viewers to literature and poetry. The change has begun. Words are always around us in visual and auditory form. Contextualising them in new ways will give birth to an evolution in language. Text based artistic projects analyse the relation between meaning captured in the object itself and extracted by the user. The source of these meanings is often part of one of the work’s levels of interpretation. This is especially apparent to me in the Text Rain piece where the user’s actions influence the letter and word actions, although all the examined pieces incorporate this type of behaviour.

The second reading brought to light techniques used by contemporary font designers in the 1980s. It is interesting to observe the number of the procedures, which have remained predominant to this day. Fonts continue to be programmed letter-by-letter, glyph-by-glyph. A human, or team of humans, decides on this collection’s appearance and style. This is reminiscent of the sculpture style of font creation using metal as a blacksmith would. Only the tools have changed. Physical constraints remain at the forefront of typographic design. Inspiration comes often in the form of tradition like the author’s pen or a classic typewriter. One of the strategies that may seem obvious but may in fact be the most important element: "The reader of the book should not be conscious of the g’s and the k’s in that book". All letters should have the ability to stand on their own as well as form words, sentences and ideas using the created font.

 In response to the readings of :

• "Digital Literature: Interview with Noah Wadrip-Fruin"
• Wadrip-Fruin. Screen (video), Talking Cure.
• Utterback and Archituv. TextRain.
• Knuth. "The Concept of a Meta-Font", pp. 289 – 295 of Ch. 15 in Digital Typography