text art

text art

The Evolution and Impact of Text Art in the Digital Age

1. Introduction to Text Art

The world wide web provides access to significantly more information than any other form of media and this has never been more true – massive amounts of text art are just a few clicks along an arbitrary link away. The ease of creation, transcoding, experimentation, and sharing brings a certain set of challenges relating to preservation, longevity, and reputation of text art in the digital age. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of this art community, its history, examples of art, the unique challenges that face digital text art, and provides a strong case for the viability of researching text as an artistic medium.

Creating text with the intent of expressing art isn’t a new concept – humans have been using language as a medium for art for centuries. As technology has advanced, text art has evolved with it, reaching a large audience through print, web, and various digital platforms. While various forms of text-based art (including typography and calligraphy) have attracted art appreciators in the world, there is a form of digital text-based art that isn’t often treated with high regard. This particular medium of art has a similar level of accessibility to both creators and consumers but often doesn’t pay off directly in financial gain. Because of these similarities, digital presentations of this art sometimes have the perception of mimicking the higher regarded analog (e.g. painting). Although, digital text-based art presents its audience with a much broader range of artistic approaches with a topic.

2. Historical Development and Key Figures

Despite its resurgence, text art is still not bestowed the same kind of reverence that is associated with traditional visual art or visual artists, but references to it still litter culture. Some of the most influential artists at the beginnings of digital society owe a specific debt to this original word-based art form, and that was the through-line in their subversive genius. This essay seeks to return a small measure of dignity to text art by tracing its development. Of particular interest is the contribution of key early figures in computer-mediated communication and implication when they named their influences in text art. These early theorists recognized text art as an art form worth considering and acknowledging. The form is more interesting and influential because of this connection and through-line.

The contemporary use of emoticons and emojis is rooted in 19th-century text art. That is, what is one of the most common ways we express emotions, sentiment, and mood on the digital landscape has an origin in a pre-electronic era. Indeed, in the early 20th century, textual forms like smiley faces and heart symbols blossomed alongside other representational forms in print and tone-based culture. I distinguish these textual forms as text art. Text art went through a long period of dormancy until faddishness in the 1960s would bring it temporarily back into the public mindset. Text art did not fully re-emerge as a unique art form until the 1990s as broader tech culture exploded, setting the stage for its increasing popularity in the last two decades as digital society matured. Text art has surprising breadth in terms of both style and representation, and it is interesting for thinking about meaning creation in digital society.

3. Techniques and Tools in Text Art

A goal is to adopt, in a few areas, methods that relate the form characteristics of typographic characters, and to create a tool or add tools to the resulting group to reduce the labor and tedium often associated with construction of art. The tools chosen are not an exhaustive set – for example, even in the einie example, some paths evolved separately in words, but in adjacent it interested to see in the creation of iteration they were created as a single path. Other tools not considered include those invoked when images transformed the typographic. This recognizes the value of existing tools, to confirm that present improvements address actual needs and problems, but to extend where those tools are insufficient, to emphasize the need for a more fundamental understanding of the techniques applied in text art.

The basic tool groups in software which can be used to perform text art tasks are: – Dot Plots – Paint Tools – Ihre-Like Tools – Tone Tools. It’s necessary to isolate the steps in text art creation that pose unique issues, and to examine through discussion and examples present digital support for visual form as selective monthly curable typographic visual weight, enhanced or varied text alignment, tang loading with typography related metrics, and automatic vectorization with typographic.

Characters can also be printed repeatedly, with a change in darkness, ‘stretched’ to generate necessary density, or placed on a grid to suggest their function. Photographic images might be printed in halftone, which has a tradition of simulating visual form with typographic elements – with printers’ pieces called dots or screen blemishes. The raster-like positioning of characters, to create form even in line printer or daisy wheel text forms, may use a typeface with an axis of extensibility. And arrangement of text art is often the necessary act of visual form creation – but there exists no system, word processed or otherwise, which directly transforms a digital image to create visual form with an individual typographic character.

The typewriter, and in particular its ability to easily generate text of varied visual weight and orientation, played the historical role of making text art generally accessible, and continues to influence the teletype, professional typesetting systems, and contemporary word processors. Programs to generate ASCII art change the relative positions of selected characters to create a visual form, while literary authors work primarily to create the form of the text (as in concrete poetry). Both processes ignore font, except when using an external type system, such as the teletype consisting of printed, scalable type elements. Font in typewriters and most proportional spaced fonts is based more on typography than visual weight, which is typically ignored in plain, unstylized ASCII art – the relationship of each lettershape to type-specific visual weight is not considered when choosing the letter.

A wide variety of ways exist to create text art in the digital era. But nearly all techniques depend on the creation of text rather than image objects. So feedback and control over image objects, that might arise from form, color, or visual weight, need more abstract methods or tools. We’ll review several of these techniques, particularly as they relate to type as form.

4. Applications and Influence in Contemporary Culture

Cultural transformations take a generation to be assimilated, and new text art is as fresh as this morning’s first communication and advertisement. In 50 years, the achievement of this first digital generation is equivalent to the wording “Commercial Art” is today. It did not matter if commercial art was a deluxe product, such as advertising pages in fashion magazines, billboard posters, or labels for product packaging. It was useless, indeed could be considered harmful, if it took the place of proper art media and methods. By 120 years, the rude fare of the tens of thousands of professional image processors reaches such amplitude that museums acquired prize-winning examples as it recognized masterpieces of craft and inclination of these digital picture producers.

Text art in the old pre-digital days of the 1960s-1980s found use on typewriter-generated signs at truck stops, craft and adorned women’s clothing during the mad phases of the 1970s. Image texts were used in magazines briefly, mainly as ties to stylish, tech-savvy, and subscriber base enthusiasts who purchased expensive equipment to produce and display them. As a class, image text is considered frivolous, not something for thoughtful textual manipulation. Most computer workers use their machines like advanced typewriters. Yet the allure of the new blurs the distinction between useful text and informative drawing, just as the principles that allow variable-height fonts to be fast and economic would dictate that the text as decorative patterns of speech.

5. Future Directions and Innovations

Digital text art is not just album art, web posters, or messages written on smartphones or computers – it is also about the human cognitive process within the still-limiting structures of digital technology. The development of the ability to align individual screens to form the single image of a participation event transformed technical experimentation and accidents into consciousness-raising messages in ways that speak to both conscious and less-conscious viewer responses. Imagine, then, what new mediums for communication are just around the corner. Text art will never have an expiration date as long as human civilization and record-keeping exist, and the future of text art can only be brighter than our wildest dreams.

What does the future hold for text art? As demonstrated here, one of the most exciting time periods in the digital age could well be that in the hours and days immediately following the publication of this article. By identifying patterns of typographic innovation and providing historical context, this paper will ideally move the field forwards and offer valuable assistance in answering future questions with historical components. The historical component alone could serve as an excellent starting point for many inspiring projects in both the design and visualization of communication.