Text as Art, Part 1 - Brittany

Text as Art, Part 1 - Brittany Heiner
[Edited 11/11/12]

One challenge of art is to find ways to express abstract concepts in a way that conveys the artist’s thoughts to another person or audience, or to approach those concepts in a different way than the audience has done before. Rene Magritte used text in his piece The Treachery of Images to express the concept of the difference between real objects and art as a representation of such objects. In Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 piece One and Three Chairs, he employed a printed copy of the dictionary definition of the word “chair” as part of his presentation of the concept of a chair. In both of these pieces, the artist uses the text to suggest his artistic concept in a way that the visual representation alone could not do. However, the text is still used as mere text, and its value is in the message the words together communicate to the reader. Many artists have used text as a component to conceptual art pieces, but the digital frontier has altered the way we use text as a human society and has opened up new applications for text itself to be used as art.

 

People use language and words to communicate ideas and information both simple and complex. As an interface between people and computers, codes such as ASCII, Bell, and Unicode were developed for programming and to represent language characters for human users. One of the first artists to use digital text characters to create art was Kenneth Knowlton. In 1966, he and Leon Harmon scanned a photograph and converted the analog voltage data via computer into binary numbers, and then used another program to interpret those numbers into text characters according to their halftone densities in order to suggest value and contrast.[i]

Knowlton and Harmon’s work, groundbreaking as it was, still was rudimentary in the way it used text in art in the digital medium. The art was created first, the text after, and the text was used only as a shape to convey the overall image, with no meaning of its own.

Of course, there was room for improvement in the medium. An artist is limited in his scope by the capacity of his tools and his own mastery of them. In computer art, this manifests itself in the computer’s software and programming, and the artist’s familiarity with them. As software evolves, and as people become more familiar with the advantages and limitations of the computer, the tools can become invisible and the focus moves away from the media and onto the concept itself. While limited in some ways, such as not having tangible manifestation of the art, digital art has other benefits over traditional media.  As stated by Christiane Paul, “the employment of digital technologies as a medium implies that the work is produced, stored, and presented in digital format and makes use of the inherent possibilities of the medium.”[ii] Particularly through networking and the Internet, these possibilities include such distinguishing characteristics as interaction with an audience beyond mere experience, its capacity to respond to changing data, and the fact that these changes and participation can be done remotely and immediately in contrast to the finite limitations of a physical work in a fixed space.[iii]

 

One such piece that produces text-required art using audience input is Apartment, by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak.[iv] The piece builds a visual blueprint-style apartment based on the words the user inputs. Upon the typing of a sentence, words fly across the screen into the layout of the “apartment,” a floor plan that alters according to the user’s additional words. It assigns words to a room according to the word’s function and the room’s function, and grows that room according to the volume of words assigned to it. In the experiment performed by this writer, words like men, she, family, talk, and them were housed in the “living room.” Words sexism, my, loves, and you went into the “bedroom,” contrary to the context of the source sentence. The “closet” was filled with find and things. Way became a “hall.” Know was put in the “library,” but complex, works, and opinion drifted between the “library” and the “office” areas, apparently because of similar use of the words. A “window” was formed and included words such as looking, country, views, world, and sees.[v]

A second experiment with it, this time using the first few sentences of the Declaration of Independence, produced the following layout:

In the Apartment applet are contained past “apartments” with more purposefully artistic layouts. (From the website, click "Apartment," then "See all apartments" in the new window to see past pieces; it is uncertain whether the archives are static, or if they keep changing, because it has been difficult to find the same pieces again.) One called “please please please” contains a two-room apartment with a revolving circle of the word please in the “dining room” and a “bedroom” full of the word desire circulating in a slow trail around the room.[vi] This writer's analysis is that the program interpreted the word desire into the sexual meaning, but the word please as a food-related meaning, perhaps suggesting that food is a cyclical pursuit, and sex is a more complex one.

Martin Wattenberg explains that Apartment was inspired by an old memory technique called a memory palace, which involves mentally associating items with specific locations.[vii] He says, “Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations.”[viii]  Through analysis of the semantics and linguistic usage of the audience’s input, the piece gives the audience visual feedback on underlying themes in their language.

Art pieces such as Apartment could never have been done before the digital era. Evolution of computers, programming, and software, and people’s familiarity with them, has enabled us to produce works that transcend the medium of digital art and allow us to look for deeper meaning in our text than as simple shapes on a screen.

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[i] Frank Dietrich, “Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975),” Leonardo 19, no. 2 (1986): 160.

[ii] Christiane Paul, “Renderings of Digital Art,” Leonardo 35, no. 5 (January 1, 2002): 472.

[iii] ibid.

[iv] Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, “Apartment,” Net Art Commissions on Turbulence, http://turbulence.org/Works/apartment/ (accessed October 8, 2012).

[v] ibid.
[vi] ibid.

[vii] Martin Wattenberg, “Martin Wattenberg: Apartment,” Martin Wattenberg: Data Visualization: Art, Media, Science, http://www.bewitched.com/apartment.html (accessed October 8, 2012).
[viii] ibid.