Starting to pack up...
...ultimately a quiet day but not without some discoveries. Johanna Drucker's site alone will keep me busy for a while!
It is also possible to create multiple streams (even group streams) - this option might come in handy for future projects.
Looking at ways to "share" the Day of DH using tags. If I share the page url with the tag extension it will only focus on those specific posts. Of course anyone refreshing the page, or clicking on another link, will expose everything else.
A chance search landed me on Johanna Drucker's Substack account (which I didn't know about!) A post on the French artist Altagor caught my attention:
"The glyphic quality of Altagor’s drawings clearly resonates with those of Isou and other Lettrists, and sorting out who invented what feels less important at this distance than recognizing the incredible currency such approaches had at the time."
Just spent some time going over the basics of GDC with C. Also went a little deeper into Lotvonen's Instagram feed (see below) and found some wonderful material. One of the most interesting was a group of students that created civilizations drawn with GDC including asemic writing systems. They then "translated" this all back into handmade books. Some more spreads.
Making progress handling "layers" which is one of the strengths of the tool.
(By the by - the Glyph Drawing Club presentation went well. Turns out several of the participants were already playing with the tool while I talked.)
Starting my "Day of Tiny Tools" here at the Collaboratory.
While setting up had a great conversation with C. about crafting communities and the beauty of crazy retro websites.
One last post before the presentation. In between the "Day of Tiny Tools" and the "Day of DH" I'll be launching a new series called Web Walk on November 19 and will be adding material here beforehand.
Spoiler alert: we'll start the series off by looking at diagram.website.
The preceding posts cover the ideas and background materials for the GDC presentation on Tuesday Oct 22.
The Friday following (25th) will be a daylong event with me working with GDC and people dropping by to watch or try it out themselves. We're calling this dry run the "Day of Tiny Tools" to test out the possibilities of using the format for the actual "Day of DH" in early December which "...is an event where digital humanists from around the world document what they do." I'll also be figuring out how best to handle all the posting over the course of the day.
An essential tool for Concrete poets was the typewriter. For a history see Typewriter Art: a Modern Anthology by Barrie Tullett.
One of my favourites is Dom Sylvester Houédard. He called his work "typestracts."
And an amazing contemporary (pictorial) typewriter artist is James Cook.
Concrete Poetry was a movement beginning in the 50s that looked to "...the ongoing human wish to combine the visual and literary impulses, to tie together the experience of these two areas into an aesthetic whole." (Higgins)
Some Canadian Concrete poets:
bp Nichol
Steven McCaffery
Judith Copithorne
And a publisher: Paper View Books (Lisbon)
Pattern overlaps with poetry in Dick Higgins' (of Fluxus and "intermedia" fame) Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature "...poetry from before 1900 that fuses literature and visual art has existed since the times of ancient Crete and Egypt."
GDC is an online tool that, as I've described it, "is for exploring pattern, poetry, and constrained drawing."
Pattern is a huge field of study (too huge!) that equally covers both science and art. One point of entry might be playing with Truchet tiles, first described in Sébastien Truchet's Mémoire sur les combinaisons (1704).
Type designer Adel Faure created a specialized font for ASCII text-based work called Jgs in honour of ASCII artist Joan G. Stark and published an interesting article about ASCII art and designing the font on the Velvetyne site.
A fascinating font by Zuzana Licko at Emigre is Hypnopaedia which involves rotating letterforms to produce something entirely ornamental.
Heikki Lotvonen started the project after discovering and working with ASCII art. And also posted an article "An Outsider's Journey into the Amiga ASCII Community".
The Glyph Drawing Club has a blog with background info and excellent tutorials. And an Instagram account with examples.
This stream was also set up to include materials of interest for a "Tiny Tools Tour" at Toronto Metropolitan University's Centre for Digital Humanities. These are drawn from the Tiny Tools Directory created by the wonderful Everest Pipkin.
The featured tool is Glyph Drawing Club created by Finnish designer Heikki Lotvonen and developer Ian Tuomi in 2018 as "a modular graphic design and text art tool."
I toyed with the idea of picking up where I left off with A Notebook of Sorts but that was primarily an exercise in thinking about, and experiencing, the "handmade web."
Glypher's Stream was set up in preparation for the "Day of DH" which requires frequent posting over the course of a day. I needed something more like a microblogging platform (preferably not mainstream, and even better if it could be considered a Tiny Tool!) hence Streams.