I’ve been thinking a lot about text these past few months. There are compelling reasons for this. Firstly, I’ve been translating, proofreading, and arranging texts for my forthcoming book, Hyper & Cosmic, to be released this June. Secondly, my students have embarked on a journey, exploring the dance of text and letter form through the language of code. Thirdly, I’ve been collaborating with a musician to craft a tool that maps texts to live video. And finally, I’ve been immersing myself in a variety of events, exhibitions, and research papers that discuss text, poetry, and manifest experimental practices as their main subject.
Language, in its myriad forms, has become a vibrant thread in the fabric of visual art. Through movements like Futurism, Dada, Fluxus, Pop art, conceptual art, concrete & visual poetry, words and letters take flight, transcending their original roles as mere units of semantic language. While there is a wealth of documentation on these movements, my own focus has been on the elusive relationship between image and text. The delicate tensions artists explore between what we consider to be purely visual and hence seeable as opposed to what appears textual and hence readable.
Two vivid memories linger in my mind, serving as a starting point for my own exploration on this subject. One is a recent talk I shared with the Royal College of Art alongside Dr. Charlotte Lengersdorf, Jack Llewellyn, and Adrian Shaughnessy. The other was a visit to the intimate exhibition, Breaking Lines. Both experiences converge on a shared vision of letters and words breaking free from the confines of semantic structures. Both are playing back in my mind as a reminder of the art I’ve been crafting over the past three to four years, deeply rooted in a cultural lineage that intertwines text, typography, art, and graphic design. A lineage that seems to be gaining traction beyond its once-marginal space.
There was a particular phrase that captivated my attention amid those talks: Typographic abstraction, a shift from semantics to spectacle where language operates beyond the role of communication. Both Llewellyn and Lengersdorf work within the confines of typography. That is to say, they create from units of language that are already guided by a particular constraint— the program of a font. And yet they seek to break these defined geometries and explore other means for engaging with text, taking on the possibilities of the digital to morph or interact with language as a medium. This is an approach that I use myself and it is also one that I teach. Interestingly, I have acknowledged a growing use of typography with my students but equally a willingness to step outside of the traditions of that particular discipline.
Breaking Lines is actually two exhibits: One presents the poetic work of the futurists, the other the concrete poetry of Dom Sylvester Houédard. While visiting, I was taken aback by the beauty of the works presented and the fascination that these two movements provoked in line with my current work with text. I realised that there is a rich history to delve into, that could perhaps give me answers to where I am in my own practice but also just excite me to pursue what I am doing.
Thinking back to that long process of making a book, I realise that I have been able to pinpoint some of the finer details of those two projects: Hypertype & Cosmic. It was the goal from the outset, a process by which I not only intended to document and archive the work, but equally shed some light on a body of work that somehow eluded me.
Currently, I’m reading essays by the Portuguese artist, Ana Hatherly. She writes with a strong sense of introspection; what she has to write about is bound by historical fact entwined with a deep empirical awareness of her own practice. It’s compelling and eloquent as well as informative.
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