Presentation

The ReCode Project was initiated in 2012 by Matthew Epler as a community-driven effort to preserve computer art. The concept was simple: choose a computer art work and reconstruct the work using a modern-day programming language. The project sought to raise awareness of a little-known history. It equally had a role to educate and was a means to share work for others to learn from and build on.

While its beginnings sparked online interest for a small and devoted circle of artists working with code, it unfortunately lost steam and the project was finally archived*. In that short space of time, however, I had personally become fascinated by the history of algorithmic art and had already contacted a prominent pioneer in the field to come to France and share in his experience of ‘recoding’. It was the beginning of educational work inspired directly from Epler’s initiative but considerably enriched by the experiences that ensued.

In this presentation, I will retrace my interest in the ReCode project, sharing work undertaken with my students but also anecdotes that have become guiding principles as well as good food for thought.

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*In the past year, there has been renewed interest in the project with a small team at the helm. The website is live again.

https://recodeproject.com/

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A Primer

My interest in the history of computer and algorithmic art began one day while reading the introductory presentation for the 1962 exhibition, Arte Programmata. That text was written by Umberto Eco and it contained something that resembled an early description of what I was doing in programming with the computer: Putting into motion fields of possibilities from a concise mathematical program.

From Collective Creation to Creating Collectives: Arte programmata and the Open Work, 1962. Lindsay Caplan

You can also read some background context here in a short article I wrote entitled, “What! They are Re-Coding!”

Please consider buying my book Hyper & Cosmic.

The pervasive introduction and growing use of large language models presents a rupture in language of a particular order. A rupture led by aggressively imposing tools and platforms that swarm the masses. Their speed of arrival has given us little time to question them, adapt to them, nor really understand them. As someone who engages with language and especially text, I find myself constantly battling to find some sort of resolve with regards to this plight. A moderate resistance has been my only strategy. Recently, however, certain questions have come to the fore in line with my practice and general thinking about this particular invasion: If text can be automated with seamless, coherent, and meaningful charm, then what is left of the presence of the voice, the author, and the authenticity of our human experiences expressed through the written word?

Writing is a technology that has undergone a number of major revolutions from its beginnings as a mark-making tool for early commerce and agriculture. The multitude of ingenious scripts from the Sumerians, the Egyptians, to the Chinese and the Mayans, through to the dominant alphabets of the world, are testimony to a long, rich, and entangled history. We could take a deep look at that initial part of writing history. Look at the who and the why, the tools, techniques, and technologies that have slowly become an integral part of what we call today a literate culture. However, a myth is a far more enticing read, is it not? So, let us start where writing got a serious makeover and point out a contemporary take amid the AI enthusiasts who seek solace in a technological past as a means to validate a certain position of power.

One of the many arguments for encouraging the adoption of LLMs as a writing tool uses the analogy of the Gutenberg press. Indeed, the modern take pitches LLMs as a language revolution on a par with the press and all that ensued. From the democratisation and mass distribution of knowledge to its claim as the instigator of numerous revolutions. That comparative claim makes for sensational reading. Not much else. When you pick beyond the surface a little, some facts demonstrate a very different reality and reveal something more subtle and pertinent about the true characteristics of LLMs and indeed human writing itself.

Gutenberg’s invention facilitated the mass production of texts. Now, in contemporary parlance, you may hear of the press ‘automating’ the production of text and for this reason, there is a tendency to make the direct analogy with today’s machines doing a similar operation. At this point other ideas get dragged into the narrative, comparing the death of authors with the demise of the scribe and introducing complex concepts such as authorship, copyright, and authenticity. As the myth goes, Gutenberg had instigated the erosion of the hand, the gesture, and the embodied thought structures of the written word. Next came the typewriter, the computer, and the word processor, and this neatly culminates in the arrival of LLMs. We could, as so many are already doing, conclude that writing has found its ultimate and logical demise. But that narrative is wrong.

The true fact of the effects of the Gutenberg invention was that it catalysed a series of cultural revolutions — Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific, Enlightenment — with the dissemination of the written word. And through these various mouvements, slow changes took place with people who were given access to texts and consequently a literate society began to develop, albeit small and privileged. Questions relating to authorship, authority and even copyright were never really an issue. Indeed, the concept of an author beyond the Classics and as we understand it in the modern world, didn’t really have weight until the Venetians took to the press and Alde Manuce & Pietro Bembo gave us the first libretto da mano.

While the press has mediated text over the centuries through mechanical means, the imposition of LLMs is doing something completely different. It literally removes the author and hence any authenticity of text and perhaps more bluntly, it removes writing completely. In fact, there is no trace of writing beyond the rather banal argument that the model generates text from human text as a data source. For some AI evangelists, that is all we humans seem to be doing too — cutting and pasting from the dictionaries of our languages just like a machine. Which is a silly assumption.

Another point to mention here is that the Gutenberg press didn’t change the nature of text beyond its formal qualities. Metal type may have diminished the role of the scribe and we could say it also distanced the act of writing that is often so quaintly associated with that endeavour. However, and most importantly, the provenance of the original was always with the written act. The press made for greater distribution of text, but it never obfuscated writing as an activity that is fundamentally tied with the initial act of someone, somewhere, putting thoughts to paper. And why is that important? Because writing is intrinsically linked with a human act.

Writing is predominantly a human endeavour for expressing and recording thoughts. (Note, I’m not using the term encoding that is so often used here. It is not the correct term in my opinion. It reinforces a machinic, binary mechanism, and eschews all the complexity that logic seeks to reduce.) Writing is a means for thinking. (Ong, Goody, Ingold & Postman et al.) It aids in the construction of complex thought and in the structuring of ideas. It is a cool technology for meditation, not a hot bath of running water ad infinitum. Writing is a space for abstracting out ideas and fixing them to a medium that can be shared, read, analysed, criticised, and all with proof of provenance. A text can be held accountable by someone or somebodies. And when you read a text, you are a witness in part to what that person or those people are expressing.

So, are LLMs writing? Well, to put it bluntly, I don’t think they are. There has been no writing in their production. There is no author, authority, no voice behind the words we read. As a counterargument, some may ask, “Is it necessary for writing to have taken place?” Well, LLMs have an interesting role to play, no doubt, in a human process of writing. They can be meaningful sparring partners and a reasonable way to search for and research subjects as long as sources are checked. The crucial point I’m making here has little to do with whether this technology is meaningful or useful. I’m pointing out a subtle yet crucial difference that we don’t really acknowledge because the illusion of text is so pristine. It is about the human presence, authorship, and the accountability for texts that are written. An activity that has gone through that messy process of human thinking, selecting, editing, structuring and the making of choices. In short, texts have authors.

While the Internet fills up exponentially with bot-enthused enshittification, feeding back into the loop that very same generative content, it will become increasingly important for us to account for that content. Some are happy to let that happen. I call them the Singularity Simulators. They are the driving force behind the tech that is engineered to surreptitiously yet aggressively implant long-term goals that pave the way for Silicon Valley’s hidden agenda.

Personally, I prefer the meaning attached to a Sumerian tablet from 3100 BC and realise that this was once a human endeavour that is intrinsically entwined with our human histories. The fact that our societies, culturally, politically, economically and socially are constructed and continue to evolve based on our languages and specifically on our written languages, raises bigger questions about the role we adopt with the machines. That is a far bigger debate. Could it start by at least looking at what is essential - being human?

Reading

A History of Writing. Steven Roger Fischer

Lines. A Brief History. Tim Ingold

De la bêtise artificielle. Anne Alombert

Qu’est-ce que lire? José Ortega y Gasset

The city that lanched the publishing industry. BBC

De Aetna Dialogue. Pietro Bembo

Promenade aux Pays de l’écriture. Armando Petrucci

The dawn of the post-literate society. James Marriott

Medium Hot. Hito Steyerl

Post Scriptum

I observe quite a pushback with regards to AI in recent times. I also read that resistance is a futile battle. I clearly stand amongst the resistance and yet I want to be able to adapt to these changes without being thrown into the Luddite clan of past. AI has a lot to offer us. The above piece of writing may well be of little importance but it did actually help me to clear some complex thoughts that have been rushing through my head for a good while now. I’m sharing because it may be of interest to others. I’m a firm believer in the sharing of ideas. I have faith in humanity.

There is a whole creative field out there that is quite niche but seems to be gaining interest in light of the current developments with autonomous agents. It concerns text and computation, and scholars call it computational literature or computational literary studies. Over the past two years, I’ve been slowly dipping into the field, learning about the who and what and beginning to shape ideas on the ultimate why too. At a time when machines are capable of generating text that is as convincing in its content and meaning as it is problematic in its provenance and status, many complex questions have come to the fore. My understanding of these is small, but I feel compelled to structure some ideas in writing here and share with you some recent work.

Roughly two years ago now, I started to compile a small set of computer functions that can manipulate text. These were relatively humble operations for cutting up text, sampling letters, words, rearranging them, and replacing them. The main goal was to use these in a short course with my graphic design students and propose that they work on text as a subject at large but with some use of the computer and programming. Two main questions drove my interest and became the underlying thread for that work: Firstly, if text can be computed, then what kind of computations are possible? Secondly, what meaningful patterns arise from these? The first iteration of that course was well received, and the students proposed some fascinating ideas. Encouraged by this, the small set of functions grew, and I began to work on a personal set of protocols to explore further these two questions. I’m currently developing this framework with the intention of publishing as well as exhibiting work in the future. I also pursued with the course this year, and I hope to share some of my student’s productions soon.

It is precisely this hands-on relationship with code and language that has sharpened my unease about what autonomous agents are doing to both. I maintain a healthy scepticism towards these so-called tools. I say healthy because I use them myself, partly to get things done like us all, yet mostly to learn more about their workings and the kind of effects it may be having on me as my students. I’m aware of my limits with regard to use and I remain very conscious of the broader implications that using these tools may have on our societies and ecologies at large. One of the main issues that really interests me is how these technologies are displacing the role of the author/creator.

How much of the process are you willing to give up to the machine and how much credit do you give it in the final work? Working with computer code and generative practices since the late 2000s, these were questions that I was fully aware of but never really gave much thought. For me, the writing of code to generate artistic production was an equal part of that creative process. The fact that I was engaged and implicated in the writing of that code was testament to my role. However, with the arrival of autonomous agents, those questions have become ever-present again.

Going back to the framework I’ve been developing lately to explore text and computation, it should be pointed out that I’ve not yet implemented any Large Language Models. While I acknowledge a variety of artists, poets, and researchers working with their own language models, I’m intentionally limiting my own work to traditional programmatic practices in generating texts. There is a rich, albeit small, history of computer-generated texts demonstrating innumerable ways in which to engage with language using a purely programmatic approach. This, along with my work with my students, is my current guide to learning more skills as a programmer and directly influencing my work as a poet, author, and artist. In a time when the question of who or what makes a text has never been more fraught, I find that working slowly, programmatically, and by hand remains my clearest way of thinking it through.

Some recent finds that have inspired this brief text.

Inventing Eliza. How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI.

Eliza Archaelogy. A gem of a website sharing research for the above book.

An Anthology of Computer Generated Text, 1953-2023.

What is Authorship When Machines Can Write?

Workshops are a staple in my teaching and they are a great opportunity to confront ideas, especially with a new group of students. Recently I was invited to ESA Saint-Luc in Brussels to give the second-year graphic design students an introduction to working with code and generative strategies. That may read as rather grand and pretentious. A three-day workshop is a short time to learn about code and generative art and design. Consequently, I had initially thought about sharing some of my thoughts on the finer details of how this workshop was organised and of how it turned out. While attempting to draw up a first draft of this idea, I found myself more drawn to sharing something else.

Some Common Sense Sentences On Workshops.

a). The purpose of a workshop is to explore and learn together. It is a time and place to exchange and simply try things out. Sharing is an essential common goal. It is equally about what you give to others as it is what you take from the experience.

b). The person conducting a workshop is a facilitator. This is directly linked with the above statement. Workshops should not be used as a means for communication or the advertising of a person or entity. The person or persons leading are there to open doors, not to put up posters of themselves.

c). There is no pre-defined end. The objective or objectives are a pretext for motivation. The true goal is in the process of learning, not in some pre-thought finality.

d). The process is intrinsically linked to the sharing of the common and this is in direct relation to the amount one learns.

e). The more one gives, the more one can learn.

f). Workshops start with the individual and progress to the group.

g). The facilitator should organise moments for exchange throughout the workshop.

h). Workshops instigate further inquiry and research.

i). Research is what all creatives occupy themselves with whenever they are not dealing with some fixed idea.

j). Finish a workshop with simple observations. In the end, everyone can learn something. And that something is invariably from others and in the understanding that all ideas have something to gain from the sharing of one’s thoughts with others.

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RND_000 was a three-day workshop where students explored some loosely defined ideas around generative tools written in Processing, instigating a time to experiment, share, and discuss. As a bonus, we printed out our work and made a website, attempting to derive some understanding of what we made using a system of classification - an approach that remained open and flexible.

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Esa Saint-Luc Workshop 2026 Website
https://rnd000.netlify.app/

For further notes about my pedagogical approach to teaching code to graphic designers, you can learn more at the links below.

Designing Programs
https://designingprograms.bitbucket.io/

Off The Grid
https://mwebster.online/dev/journal/offthegrid

Some student work
https://www.are.na/mark-webster-1526199907/designing-programs-student-work

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You may well know that I recently published a book on two of my artistic works. Hyper & Cosmic is published by Vetro Editions and can be ordered here. Please consider supporting. Kind regards.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Invaded by Time. Ana Hatherly, 1991

While conducting personal research on other artists working with text, I began to become increasingly aware of a particular question: When does one begin to see images rather than read text? Four particular artists had come to the fore with regard to this, each with their own specific angle on language but who were all working in a realm defined by the overlapping of painting, drawing and writing. Moreover, they were all affiliated with what became known as asemic writing. A curious art form that blurs the boundaries between what we consider to be text, and hence can be read, and image—what we see.

Asemic writing is a term coined relatively late in our history. Adopted by two visual artists, Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich in 1997, as a means to distinguish art that was “involved with units of language for reasons other than producing meaning.” To me, that seems a strange definition because linguistic elements that are not necessarily understood in the purely communicative sense still have the possibility to be meaningful. Wikipedia gives another perspective, describing this practice as “a wordless, open semantic form of writing.” When we search for the etymology of asemic, we find another angle: /eɪˈsiːmɪk/ means ‘without signs’ (from Greek: asemos (ἄσημος) = without sign, unmarked, obscure, or ignoble). It is writing that “has no specific semantic content.” ”It is writing without language”— which reads to me like an oxymoron! The above attempts at defining asemic writing left me somewhat bemused, unsatisfied and hungry to find something better to chew on.

If we are to understand semantics as meaning, then surely semantics is not confined to the boundaries of words but signs in general? This encompasses not just words but also gestures, images, sounds, objects, space and even absence. It is therefore the realm of semiology. This is perhaps the distinction to be made with asemic writing. We have before the eye what looks like a language and yet we don’t read it as such; rather we perceive it both within the context of a text, hence language, and yet it expresses something beyond what is considered purely communicative. It may not convey anything but it is latent with meaning. For meaning arises from our own means for interpretation and the gathering of the particulars.

At the Network’s Edge. Federico Federici, 2025.

The asemic artist Federico Federici proposes a wonderful perspective on this with commentary on his own work. For Federico, an asemic text generates signification rather than conveying meaning. “Interpretation is not an external process imposed upon a text but something that emerges through the encounter between the text and the reader.” The process he describes is unstable, constantly oscillating between recognition and abstraction, between the deciphering of words and the perception of forms.

I read similarities here with a particular Roland Barthes quote:

“You have managed to produce a certain number of forms that are neither figurative nor abstract, forms that could be called illegible writing, which leads readers to formulate something that is neither a specific message nor a contingent form of expression, but, rather, the idea, the essence, of writing.“ — Letter to Mirtha Dermisache. Roland Barthes, 1971.

Untitled Letter. Mirtha Dermisache, 1970

Roland Barthes pinpoints a peculiar characteristic of Mirtha Dermisache’s work, calling these odd shapes before his eyes “illegible writing.” What I find intriguing is that Barthes also expresses a subtle and complex conundrum: that we can perceive before the eyes a series of shapes that we recognise as some form of language and yet these very shapes are unreadable. This may not be of any particular importance to most of us. After all, we all look on a daily basis at many languages that we do not understand, whether that be an Asian sign on a restaurant facade or a web page written in any language other than your native one. The difference here, however, is that Dermisache’s foreign language is of pure invention, marks of gesture that eschew any clear communicative intention or semantic function.

The German artist Irma Blank took this idea to an even more radical level. Blank became interested in language when she moved to Sicily in 1955. She apparently had great difficulty in learning Italian and it is perhaps this very experience that influenced her choice to reduce language to its most pure visual form. Indeed, what I find particular about Blank’s work is the overlapping practices of painting, drawing and writing. The work is minimal and rigorous, almost like a meditation on reducing letter and word to repetitions that at times become only lines. And yet such minimal form, suggests so distinctly that what we are looking at is some form of language.

Eigenschriften, Schwarz 9. Irma Blank, 1973

“I try to resolve existence in writing, to grasp the rhythm and breath of the world, through the only instrument of writing that recalls origins, beyond all meaning. I have released writing from its enslavement to meaning; I have given it an autonomous dignity. Meaning. Being.” —Irma Blank

A persistent thought while researching these artists remains: What is the difference between writing and drawing? In Tim Ingold’s magnificent book, A Brief History of Lines, a number of answers can be found. For Ingold, writing is a graphic inscription close to drawing — it is embodied movement. The inscriptive trace of gesture. Writing is an evolution that starts with gesture, becoming drawing, notation and eventually writing. All writing begins of course with drawing but then it turns into notation, becoming a system for encoding. However, I don’t want to diverge here from the topic of asemics and I may well return one day to Ingold and write more on this fascinating inquiry.

The conflation of writing and image can be observed in the poetical work of Ana Hatherly. A prominent figure from Portugal who also wrote a number of essays on her practice and language at large. What I find particularly interesting in Hatherly’s work is her profound investigation of gesture and the exploration of the concepts of writing. In her early years, she sought to disrupt the hierarchies of grammar and the page while later returning to what she called the ‘intelligence of the hand’ and the constant back and forth of drawing as writing and vice versa.

The Pleasure of the Text. Ana Hatherly,1977.

“As I often said, “eu queria mostrar a escritura, não o escrito” - I wanted to show the writing not the written. I wanted to draw the attention to writing in order to appeal to a new form of reading.”

Ana Hatherly. Voices of Reading

Indeed, the type of languages proposed by each of these artists purposely denies any clear communicative intention or pure semantic function. Rather, they question our collective convention of the sign and the signifier, blurring the boundaries between words and objects and challenging the very possibilities of our languages. In my eyes, they sought and seek openness rather than the tyranny of the linguistic canons.

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My newsletter is free for all for the time being, so please consider supporting my work in other ways. I recently published a book entitled Hyper & Cosmic that presents two consequential art projects. I have also recently published an album of my music.

• Hyper & Cosmic Book. Vetro Editions. 2025
• Fragments & Fabrications. 2026
• Website : mwebster.online
• Instagram : tisanesound

Hockney Meets Matisse by The Sea in Brittany. AI Image. 2022

Everybody has something to say about AI at the moment, and I apologise in advance for adding yet another opinion here to the stack. Don’t turn the page yet though. I’d like to share some thoughts that are a response to a recent talk I saw on the tinkernet*. I’ll be short and sweet on this.

The subject of AI is like a vast and noisy parliament of conflicting views, and even within my small field of the visual arts, the issues are myriad and complex. There really isn’t a day that goes by without hearing or reading something about this. Indeed, the pace at which we are subjected to so-called ‘news’ is not only staggering, it is tiring. To the extent that I sense that this constant influx is a strategy to drown us all and make us succumb to their wishes! A more tempered view, however, is that this continuous crying out on the subject is quite simply a reflection of a particular race taking place. And like the arms race, the ultimate goal seems not to be in the name of progress for humanity, but the usual suspects : greed and power.

Let me get back to our little corner of the arts, however. The other day I came across a talk by Robert Hodgin, which he gave this year at Namur’s Kikk festival. Now, I’m no newcomer to Robert’s work in code and art. His work has been a huge inspiration ever since I saw his insightful talk back in the days at OFFF Barcelona 2007, where he was showing off some stunning flocking simulations. It has apparently been ten years since he last gave a talk, so I was delighted to come across this one and especially with a title like this : Why Bother? Making Art in the Age of AI.

Now, either you go straight to the video and watch it, or you can read on and learn about how this highly insightful and entertaining talk by Robert made me feel. (But do go watch it.)

There were a few remarks, hmmm, no, I’d say ideas, that struck a chord with my own experiences with this technology. For those who are new to my work, I’ve been working with AI technologies for a good few years now, both as an artist and as a teacher in higher education. I have no expertise per se in the field, but I have enough knowledge to validate what I would call a strong opinion. Before the rise of chatbots and LLM-driven generative platforms, I was diving deep into Python notebooks, collecting and making datasets, and enjoying the technicalities of making new images with GANs. It took quite a considerable amount of time to learn about these new techniques; the protocols were often long and fastidious, and the results were not always successful. However, I had quite a clear vision of a particular process that I was both learning about and implementing in my artistic work. Some of the first work to arise from this personal research was my ongoing series, Neural Drawings. A series that brought together AI, traditional generative art, and printing. I felt that what I was doing was interesting because it was a new direction, it was fresh to the eyes, highly personal, and meaningful. Then, the prompt arrived.

In the beginning of that particular approach, I’d come across a Python notebook that implemented Stable Diffusion, and at the time, I was introducing this technique to my students. Not so late after, Midjourney arrived on the scene, and there was this explosion of excitement around this new platform that made it as easy as writing a prompt to generate an image. The results were interesting, even at this early stage of the technology. Today, of course, the quality of images is spectacular, and the results can be most compelling. There was a question, however, that became apparent as I tried to engage with these new prompt technologies. After some months of test-driving the ‘next best thing in creativity’, that question just stuck with me and still does: What is my role as an artist in this relatively simple act of prompting?

Robert, in his talk, hits upon a similar observation. Why bother with struggling to write code and/or learn complicated software, slaving night and day at the computer to make art when one can simply describe to the machine what one wants in natural language?And get engaging art for such little effort!? He, like myself, feels strongly about conflicting factions battling it out here in the artist’s mind. Battles that have yet to be won, or rather resolved. It is a curious state of mind. On the one side, we are drawn in by the spectacle and we want to engage with this new technology. Robert mentions the infamous FOMO effect that seems to drive a lot of the AI race these days. On the other, we have this need to be a part of a creative process that requires effort and personal investment. A process that we create very much ourselves over time and hence I believe we have a deeper belonging to.

That observation resonates with me and in a way, it actually comforts me to know that someone else out there amongst the masses is battling with a contemporary dilemma. Besides all the other issues that make AI such a contested field, I can safely say that as an artist, I am still far more attracted to the struggle than to the option of instant gratification. It is my efforts in a process that I conceive of, develop and essentially create which help give value and meaning to what I do. Without that struggle, I simply feel a lost curator of someone else’s content, disillusioned and holding onto some self-convinving thought that if ‘they’ are doing it, then why not follow suit. From another angle; The AI spectacle is perhaps akin to the Hollywood blockbuster that one can so easily sit back and watch go by. Whereas its counterpart is the bland pages of a book and the focused effort of reading lines and lines of printed ink. Both are indeed viable means and mediums but one stokes the fire of one’s imagination in a far different manner than the other in my view.

*tinkernet : a fond personal term I often use for the Internet.

** As an afterthought, let me add that there already exists a brief article about vibe coding over here. While writing this particular letter however, I was reminded of an earlier essay I wrote for an online platform entitled On Craft, Art & Programming. There are more things to be said about how we attribute value to our creative work and indeed to the work of others. I’d like to believe that the quick and easy eye candy fix brigade will be left with the hype with which so much of this AI is enshrouded.

A brief letter to announce that I’ll be in Paris on Saturday 15th November to sign my new book Hyper & Cosmic with Vetro Editions at Offprint Paris.

It really hasn’t sunk in, the fact that I am an author and designer of a book. Furthermore, the book contains artwork that I have worked on for the past few years with constant zeal. I was chatting recently to a good friend about the difficulty I have in taking pride in my achievements and in taking the time to celebrate those moments - no matter how small that celebratory moment is. In a world where we are submerged with images and words and we are encouraged to remain efficient and productive, perhaps we have lost (or just I have lost), the capacity to take a moment to celebrate what we already have?

My friend made an excellent point of how we celebrate certain events on a yearly basis. The importance of not just creating a moment to rejoice and recollect but also to regenerate and mark anew. Our chat brought to the fore the very thought of something I had had earlier on that day; that if one is to remember, best make for good things to remember.

So, with that good spirit, I have decided to mark a small occasion as the release of my book is given a window of opportunity next week in Paris. It is there that you may find me, if ever you happen to be in the city of light, sitting on a Saturday afternoon amid the crowd of art book lovers who so often congregate to peruse the visual delights of the printed matter.

More Info

Offprint Paris
https://www.offprint.org/

Hyper & Cosmic
https://vetroeditions.com/products/cosmic-hyper

Concrete poetry firmly took root during the 1960s when many artists were seeking to liberate the word from its shackles of the semantic sentence and enable forms of expression that would breathe new life into what many considered a quaint tradition. A truly international movement, concrete poetry was, however, a rather underground affair, to the extent that we have only just begun to unearth its existence more than sixty years later.

I came across this rather strangely named movement whilst perched up in the hills of Provence one sweltering summer in 2012, listening to a plethora of typography and literary fanatics during a week-long seminar. It was, however, only some years later that I took up interest and began to learn more about these poetic oddities. What had drawn me to these particular visuals, and why have I dedicated a whole series of personal works in line with this lingering interest in concrete poetry?

When we read words, we automatically recognise their form as letter shapes, yet we are not conscious of this form. Rather, when we read, we read concepts — meaning. This is quite a curious, albeit perhaps slight and minor detail for the everyday person. Texts are all around us and we read all the time. However, as someone who has been working within the field of graphic design and in close contact with another curious breed — typographers — certain things have come to my attention.

The written language is meant for the page, and it is here we construct meaning, letter after letter, word after word, line after line. Despite a certain freedom to play with the layout of text within the space of the page, convention imposes a simple rule of thumb with a linear structure guided by a certain direction. We read from top to bottom and either from left to right or from right to left, depending on the language. For meaning to arise, words must follow this rule along with their own semantic structures. But what kind of meaning are we talking about?

"Concrete poetry does not entertain. It holds the possibility of fascination, and fascination is a form of concentration, that is of concentration which includes perception of the material as well as apperception of its meaning." Max Bense, Rot 21.

I'd argue that meaning does not arise solely from conventional means. We do not need language – the ones we speak, write, and read — to construct meaning. Meaning can derive from all sorts of phenomena. The fact that we, however, associate some visual form as language only reinforces the illusory link and the idea that we can only derive meaning within some conventional system.

The reason I present this to you is because I'm currently excavating an area of my thoughts that are rooted in my art practice and for which I'm looking to learn more. More about what? Well, a messy process, to be quite honest. The process of making art that seeks to express something other than visual beauty. Art that has become an expression of my thinking a little outside the box and searching for other meanings.

My artistic work plays on the margins of conventional language use. I'm looking to engage with language in new ways and not always within the context of communicating something clearly. Rather, it is to be purposefully open. The series of artworks, Cosmic Poems, took shape from these ideas of the concrete, playing with the rules of structure and form. Other works have followed, and with them, my readings on the subject and topics that gravitate around the outer realms of art and language have come to inform a process for which I want to shed light on.

I've come to realise that the boundaries of text and image have become increasingly blurred within my practice. This blurring raises fundamental questions about how we process visual language: at what point do we transition from reading semantic content to perceiving pure form? When does text become image and what distinctions can be made between writing and drawing for example? These questions have become central to my exploration of concrete poetry's revolutionary approach to meaning-making, leading me to investigate the very foundations of written communication.

• Concrete Poetry I. Max Bense. Rot 21

• Concrete Poems Just Are. Eye Magazine

• Twenty things you must know about concrete & visual poetry. Type Room

• Concrete Poetry. A World View. Mary Ellen Solt.

"the way we organize our writing space is the way we come to organize our thoughts and in time becomes the way in which we think the world itself must be organized”.

Brian Eno on Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space.

Letting go of the shape of words and letters and disrupting their organisation in space. This is what I have been exploring over the past few years in my art practice. A practice that is, in itself, caught up in the very topic I seek to explore: language as text. Typing letters on the machine to ‘write’ code that will execute a set of instructions and result in a field of possibilities. I type programs to generate text. Poems even, if that is what we prefer to state. And from here the viewer may wander and ‘read’ what may. The intention is intentionally open.

As this practice has developed, I’ve come to focus on certain aspects that usually gravitate around how one creates meaning through textual language. That is a huge and complex subject. I’m not claiming to be an expert. There is no goal as such. It’s a long walk while taking in what is around. There is fascination more than anything and like all good walks, there should be wonder and delight. How I construct meaning is a constant question for me. Perhaps obsessively so, and as such there are some rather odd places encountered on that long walk.

Some of my recent work has been affiliated with concrete poetry where we find language takes on other semantic roles beyond the linear organisation of words and ideas. I like this idea of words resisting their surrounding space. Letting go, being free and taking on new configurations that may lead to other meanings and interpretations. Breaking the linearity of the page. Language can then become a disruptor again. As opposed to an established Order. I prefer the idea of heightening meaning through openness.

One recent development in my work has been a variety of thoughts on how we write texts these days and the acknowledgment that we actually write less and less and type more and more. This has led to me wondering about the differences in how we write and how this changes how we construct and indeed access meaning. Something I’ll write more about with this series. For now though, one particular aspect came to the fore with the following question: If writing is a form of thinking, then surely the way we write affects this process?

We type and we type with fonts on a machine. Fonts are letter forms and they are designed, for the most part, specifically to make typing and reading text easy and accessible. When it comes to these two activities, fonts are conventional. The eye gets tired and the typographer must alleviate any strain, so the shape of letters are pretty similar with small exceptions to the rule. There is a micro level of typography, dedicated to these shapes, their spacing, weight and particularities. There is equally a macro level which is how these typographic elements are organised in space, their layout and hierarchy. The typographer is making small choices that guide the reader’s experience and indeed their interpretation - even before they process the words – while the designer is controlling the flow of attention determining what gets read first and the relationships between blocks of text.

Layout functions as a a means for ordering text. Typography functions on a lower level as a means for ordering letters. Both are guided by certain rules and conventions to structure language and perhaps even normalise its scope of interpretation under the pretext of a common space for reading, writing and meaning to take place.

These cultural agreements that derive from the typographer and the designer has me thinking about how standardisation of typographical rules can have a subtle effect on broader cultural tendencies towards the control of text. That is to say, in constraining how text can appear, we constrain what kinds of thinking can arise. I am of course taking an artistic perspective on this and not a literary one. I am essentially interested in extending the boundaries of the text beyond the traditional literary function.

This brings me to an article I recently found on the web written by Brian Eno entitled Writing Space and relates to Jay David Bolter's theory of the same title. Writing Space presents a bold yet compelling argument that writing technologies fundamentally shape how we think and organise our understanding of the world. Eno summarises Bolter's central thesis: "the way we organize our writing space is the way we come to organize our thoughts, and in time becomes the way in which we think the world itself must be organized." Bolter calls this the "root metaphor" - where the writing space becomes the foundational metaphor through which literate cultures understand the human mind and reality itself.

That article accompanies a series of ideas that currently entertain me. Ideas that are complex, that I’m trying to navigate and learn more about. This brief letter from me is the beginning of a series of new works entangled in what I have called The Tyranny of Typography. More texts will arrive as will the art that has evolved throughout the piecing together of these disparate and fragmented thoughts.

• Writing Space

• Pendant La Lecture : Gerard Unger.

You may well know that I recently published a book on two of my artistic works. Hyper & Cosmic is published by Vetro Editions and can be ordered here. Please consider supporting. Kind regards.

"What a person or animal perceives is not only an arrangement of objects, of colors and shapes, of movements and sizes. It is, perhaps first of all, an interplay of directed tensions. These tensions are not something the observer adds, for reasons of his own, to static images. Rather, these tensions are as inherent in any percept as size, shape, location, or color. Because they have magnitude and direction, these tensions can be described as psychological "forces."

Rudolf Arnheim. Art & Visual Perception. 1974.

A few days ago I came across this interesting article about patterns in art. The article, entitled The Pleasure of Patterns in Art takes a dive into Gustave Caillebotte’s painting Paris Street;Rainy Day and proceeds to analyse the various elements as well as the how those elements work together within the perceptive field. It pinpoints phenomena that took me back to when I was reading a lot on this subject. Mostly what I taught as gestalt theory to my students. It was also a stern reminder of a project I set up back in 2020 and for which I’d dearly like to find the time to accord further development.

Back then I got quite heavily into this question of how we see a work of art and equally as a practicing artist how an image is created. One of the first references I ever read on the subject was E.H.Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. One of his lesser-known titles, which is a truly brilliant exploration of the history and psychology of pictorial representation. From here I discovered Rudolf Arnheim’s foundational work from the sixties and this opened up a whole realm of thought that profoundly changed the way I thought about images.

We first see images and we make up our minds very quickly about whether that image is of interest to us or not. Seeing however is the easy part, it’s about what happens when we dig a little deeper. When we begin to read images. Looking carefully at what meets the eye can be a most revealing activity. We can of course read an image from various angles; we can take into consideration its history, or look into a biography of the artist for example. The one I’m highlighting here is purely formal. It’s looking at what are the graphic elements and how they have been composed. Going beyond subject matter and searching for those slightly more hidden meanings. It’s about opening up the sense of sight and trying to fully grasp why one image has perhaps more meaning to you than another. And I’m using meaning quite loosely here but what I’m getting at is that the pleasure we may sense in an image, usually has something to do with its symmetry, its repetition, its positioning of form and all those various features which build up the concept of the image before us.

Now, to jump back to my initial thought on that article I stumbled across. There is on the web a little space I called the Computation Graphic Design Manual. The beginnings of this project had taken form during that time of intense interest in the psychology of the image. And I wanted to bring that into my teachings and understandings with creative coding. I had managed a semester with my students working with these principles of gestalt and how they may be both transferred to and translated with code. The results were positive and promising but I never created the time to push it further. It has been sitting there on the shelf for some time now. Like a mental itch albeit not so present. That is until a random article comes my way and gets the motivation flooding. If anyone is interested in working on this with me, please reach out. I had been working with RNDR with this for a while and it would be nice to continue that too.

Signing off here today but I have been entertaining a good number of ideas for future letters. So please stay tuned.

• The Computational Graphic Design Manual

• The Pleasure of Patterns in Art

• RNDR Studio

You may well know that I recently published a book on two of my artistic works. Hyper & Cosmic is published by Vetro Editions and can be ordered here. Please consider supporting. Kind regards.

Many of you who have been following my work since the beginning will know that I have a strong affiliation with open source and have been teaching creative coding for over fourteen years. I remain committed to this work and often share my teachings through small open-source projects, mostly archived on BitBucket. Documenting and maintaining this work is not always easy, but it is important to me. It is a commitment to sharing with others, and perhaps more importantly, it is an activity guided by values that are inherently unmotivated by selfish gain.

When we create tools in this field and give permission for anyone to access, study, modify, and even share them with others, we are essentially making an important decision. This decision empowers others with shared knowledge and enriches everyone culturally and intellectually.

Recently, I was slightly worried to learn of a new term that has appeared on the tech radar: openwashing. Openwashing is a practice whereby companies claim to be open source while keeping critical parts of their services proprietary. Unfortunately, this appears to be happening at scale and particularly within the current AI tech race.

I have a vivid memory of visiting OpenAI’s website, long before it began rolling out today’s range of AI tech devices. It was a simple website with a compelling mission statement. The research project appeared to tick all the boxes of a legitimate and inspiring Open Source project, clearly positioning itself as a non-profit organisation dedicated to envisioning safe and ethical development and use of AI technologies. This was an ambitious project committed to working openly on AI technology and advancements to clearly benefit humanity. So it came as no surprise that OpenAI truly caught my attention and no doubt due mostly to its open source ethos promoting transparency and collaboration.

“Discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.”

Many things have changed since then as you may well know. OpenAI became a business fuelled by huge capital investment, and while they did attempt to uphold their good intentions, there have been concerns about how the organisation has changed and how it goes about its business behind closed doors. My question to all this is simple: why is it still called OpenAI?

Many AI technologies today are pitched with a particular strain of ‘Openness’ and present themselves as open-source projects. Until recently, I hadn’t really thought much about this. In fact, I even believed more in these technologies because of their open-source ethos. However, there have been concerns about the varying degrees of access to these tools, raising questions about how transparent and open these organisations truly are. You only need to look to OpenAI again to realise that the only means of fully accessing their APIs is through paid contracts and online interfaces.

For a piece of software to be open source, anyone should be able to use it for any purpose without permission, study its workings and inspect its components, modify it for any purpose, including changing its outputs, and share it with others, with or without modifications and for any purpose. In 2024, the Open Source Initiative launched a new definition, OSAID 1.0, specifically for AI projects and I guess in part also to deter openwashing. While this proposal is a welcome addition to the regulatory issues surrounding current AI developments, it becomes evident that most AI companies do not comply with this new definition. To add insult to injury, reputable sources challenge this definition, claiming it is too loose and permissive.

Indeed, there’s a complicated issue with this new definition that seems to overlook a fundamental point: the omission of the dataset used to train a model. While the definition stipulates that the training dataset must be listed as a source, it doesn’t necessarily require distribution to fulfil the definition’s requirements. This is a significant omission for an open-source project, as a model without a dataset is essentially useless. Moreover, using one’s own dataset would result in unusual results due to the weights already baked into the model.

This particular issue of omitting the training dataset is problematic and only highlights how many companies are also obscuring access to these essential resources. I recently shared some links about the infamous Pile dataset a few months ago, only to find that it’s no longer hosted. While my tweeting wasn’t the cause, I do recall that some of the data’s contents were eye-opening. On another search for datasets recently, I discovered that none of the major AI services provide access to prompt data. This further brings to the forefront the contentious issue of copyright which is a hot topic among AI sceptics, and rightly so. If these companies claim transparency and openness, then surely we should also be able to access the data they’ve scraped from us? *(ref Note1).

So, how should I sign off with this one? You might not think this is significant news, or you might not care about third-party organisations like the Open Source Initiative. Personally, I do, and I firmly believe that the future of these technologies will increasingly rely on compliance with regulation. However, as things stand, regulation isn’t particularly strict when it comes to accepting or rejecting a company’s ‘openness’. In my search for a definition of open source amidst the EU AI Act, I couldn’t find anything, and certainly not a mention of the Open Source Initiative, despite their relatively permissive proposal. This lack of clear directive is problematic, as it undermines the entire open-source ethos and paves the way for future generations to prioritise profit over the sharing of wealth. In a world where anything goes, it becomes increasingly challenging to steer the ship.

On a more positive note, I do believe we can make a difference. I think regulation will find solutions, and I firmly believe that governance of information through open-source initiatives will remain an important means for steering the ship towards a fairer future for all.

* Note1

An interesting move by the web giant Cloudflare is worth noting on this topic. On July 1st, 2025, Cloudflare decided to block AI bots by default. This is a significant move for a company whose share of the web touches roughly 20%. By closing down automated data extraction, Cloudflare has single-handedly exacerbated the contentious issue of who owns the value of these systems that are clearly built on human expression.

Source: AI Ethics Brief 169

Please consider supporting my work by purchasing a copy of my first publication of artworks entitled Hyper & Cosmic released with Vetro Editions.

…fin

It wasn’t long ago that people would ask, “What’s your stack?” and you’d list your coding tools. Nowadays, I hear and read more about “vibe coding.” It’s about the AI you’re using while coding and how it helps you. This means less frustrating Stack Overflow searching and more cognitive outsourcing to get your ideas into action. So, what’s my vibe, and is it a good one?

Writing programs is hard. It requires logic, understanding of concepts and structures, and for some, it’s as difficult as learning a new language. We’ve all had our fair share of horror stories when learning foreign languages, especially in 1980s Britain! Of course, that’s partly tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a common complaint among my students. Programming languages are different from our natural languages and, in my opinion, easier to learn and master. The common thread here is language. As we move towards language-centred interfaces with machines, it was only a matter of time before machines started providing coding services. Since the first AI for coding, there have been many developments. GitHub’s Copilot and then ChatGPT have made these tools available in all our applications. We can now query and find solutions, and seamlessly integrate them into our workflows. Most chatbots can even code a complex running application in minutes. So, why bother coding anymore?

There are two main experiences I’d like to share with you. The first is my work as a teacher of code in higher education and hence involves my students. The second is a more personal affair with the arrival of her into my life. AI is here, so might as well get on with it. This has been my attitude towards introducing AI into my teaching – flippant yet healthy. My students will use this technology, so I need to guide them as well as embrace it.

This academic year, I started with a basic foundation course, as I always do, passing on the fundamentals of coding. I explain to my students that this is necessary if they want to take things further. At the same time, I let them know that they can use technologies like Claude.ai or ChatGPT as long as they try to read and understand the generated code. However, I didn’t expect them to start using it immediately!

Not everyone presented their first assignment using some sort of AI assistance, but it was only a matter of time before I noticed more and more as the semester progressed. I was curious to let the experiment take on a natural course. It was unintentional on my part, but I realised that it would be important for me to understand how these tools could change my teaching and, more importantly, how they would change my students’ understanding. So, I let things flow. The results were both surprising and encouraging.

Let me clarify that I’m not teaching my students to become hardcore creative coders or professional programmers. My course aims to introduce the medium of code as a viable tool for designing, particularly graphic programs that can be generative, parametric, or interactive. I’ve been engaged in this activity for over ten years at an art school in France.

One of the main challenges I’ve faced is the frustration my students experience when trying to implement specific ideas with code. It’s completely understandable, and while I encourage them to start small and recognise that small can be just as effective, they often want to create fully generative 3D meshes that rival the best motion design. At worst, some students drop out and find contentment in making their ideas come alive with Blender and online tutorials. That’s perfectly fine too. Ultimately, my goal is for my students to express their ideas to the best of their ability, and I’m here to gently guide them towards that.

Frustration is a common feeling, even for the most skilled programmers. They can spend entire afternoons debugging forgotten semicolons or silly errors that escape the debugger. Thankfully, these bots can now correct these errors in seconds. While they’re a common use case, we wouldn’t be honest if we only used them for simple syntax and semantic corrections. My students quickly grasped this concept, and their frustration levels decreased this year. Two main observations I’ve made from this experience are that my students were much quicker to implement their ideas, and the results were quite impressive. However, there was one trade-off.

Ah yes, I hear you say, there must be a trade-off with all technologies – we gain something, we lose something else. This is where my personal experience comes in. I’ve been using this technology for a few months now, and like my students, I’ve found it fun to quickly apply ideas. I’ve also been happy letting the machine refactor old code, transform JavaScript programs into modules, and simply ask for a more concise version of a function or class. The results have been impressive.

So, what do I feel I’m losing? I say feel because I don’t have any concrete evidence to propose here, but I know I’m losing something with this technology if I don’t take care of it over time. You may have heard about this concept in the media recently – it’s called cognitive outsourcing. I call it the cognitive outsourcing conundrum because the problems aren’t always clear. What do I risk losing, I hear myself say? Time is probably not one of those things, and I certainly felt like I was wasting my time looking for that bloody semi-colon all afternoon! Time is a vital part of the conundrum because over time, the activities we decide to engage in have the ultimate upper hand on what we can understand. I think I can safely say that to truly understand something, we really have to engage with it. Relying on someone else or something else to do that for us is liberating, but I guess we’re essentially making the choice that we don’t consider that to be of any importance to us. But surely thinking about a problem is important?

Yeah, I believe it is. However, the brain is quite good at convincing us otherwise. You could be putting your efforts into something ‘more essential’ than trying to implement a travelling salesman algorithm (again). While you’re sweating it out on that task, others are rolling out production-ready apps and raking in praise for their amazing talents. Okay, I’m getting a little facetious.

Did I mention frustration? Well, it actually came back pretty fast when I was vibing a little too hard with Cursor the other day. I was happy to let the machine rewrite an old program and add some sauce, but I watched as my whole program became something else. At some point, I noticed it was implementing what I considered a rather complex solution to an easy task. If you haven’t tried Cursor yet, it’s quite an entertaining experience at times because the machine makes all these self-referential comments while coding. It’s like some odd attempt to make it look as if it is actually thinking! So silly.

Anyway, I caught a blip in its so-called thinking and decided to call it a day. Closing that AI tab in utter disgrace, I turned to the generated code and sat down for a good innings. After some considerable time—a day or two—I’d solved my problem. Was it frustrating? Yes, a little, but not as frustrating as having to deal with all that generated code, which for the most part was rather verbose. I could have pointed this out to the machine, and I’m sure it would have made amendments like a good servant it is. It felt good to code my way. Far from efficient, but at least I know I’m practising my craft and using what I know. AI can do so much better and so much faster. I’ll have to accept that, and I’m happy to dip in and learn something new, but I realise that it’s important to take that time and let the time flow with my rhythm. A powerful assistant it may be for solving problems, but I do worry about the fact that it is not necessarily helping me to get better at solving problems. Which beckons a more nuanced question. How much vibing do I need?

+ + + + >

Thanks for reading. If you would like to support my work, please consider buying a book I made. Hyper & Cosmic is published with Vetro Editions and can be ordered online at the following address:
https://vetroeditions.com/products/cosmic-hyper

\ ++ /

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.

“The concrete poet sees the word in itself as a magnetic field of possibilities, and he rejects the perspectivist syntactic organization (of conventional poetry) in which the words "sit like corpses at a banquet.”

Links

A talk with the Royal College of Art

In Session : Typographic Abstraction.

Breaking Lines

https://www.estorickcollection.com/exhibitions/breaking-lines

Guardian article about the exhibition

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/19/breaking-lines-futurism-and-the-origins-of-experimental-poetry-dom-sylvester-houedard-and-concrete-poetry-in-postwar-britain-estorick-collection-review-dsh-one-man-and-his-olivetti

Poetry on the rise

A few weeks back, I was invited to participate in a panel on the subject of code and poetry organized by VERSEVerse^1. This loose collective of poets works experimentally with the written word, extending traditional spoken word poetry into contemporary digital realms. What draws me to their work is their multifaceted engagement with text—embracing digital formats, blockchain technologies, and artificial means of writing while supporting an international roster of artists working in diverse poetical forms.

Their latest event in London brought together artists, curators, galleries, and technologists. The gathering yielded fruitful exchanges with a clear message: We are poets here not only to voice our words but to engage with language at large. That was, in any case, my interpretation.

I've been fortunate to receive attention from VERSEVerse for my work—Hypertype, the Cosmic series, and my upcoming book, Hyper & Cosmic. For the event at Ladbroke Hall in London^2, Sasha Stiles, one of the founding members, invited me to explore potential connections between code and poetry in my practice. The questions were stimulating, and it seems fitting to share these reflections in writing.

Both Cosmic and Hypertype are typographic works that have been welcomed as poetic pieces, though one is deliberately more poetic than the other, having been heavily influenced by the Concrete Poetry movement. This observation, however, addresses only the output of computer programs specifically written to create poetical artwork. What about the actual code behind these works—might it also be considered poetry?

When I first contemplated this question, several shared characteristics emerged: Both coding and poetry are languages with vocabularies, grammars, and particular structures designed to achieve specific results. In poetry, we speak of stanzas, rhyme, meter, and forms like haikus, sonnets, odes, ballads, and free verse. In code, we discuss programs, iteration, flow, and structures such as for loops, conditionals, classes, functions, observers, and factory methods.

Code is text—a formal language, certainly, but one that enables expression of ideas beyond merely executing instructions. Programming, like poetry, organizes thoughts to create fields of possibility. This parallel led me to the French literary movement Oulipo (Workshop for Potential Literature)^3, where writers sought new literary structures through playful constraints. They, like me, imagined rule sets from which results would emerge—not unlike the constraints of a haiku, the structure of a sonnet, or the deliberate play with words that defines all poetry.

This reflection triggered a memory of another movement from the 1990s involving programmers working with Perl. The Perlmonks community^4 still documents this work, representing an esoteric intersection of programming and poetry I've been meaning to explore further. Though I'm unsure why Perl specifically became a vehicle for computer language poetry, numerous initiatives have since incorporated many other programming languages. The project Code {Poem}^5 exemplifies this beautifully, collecting poems written by various artists and programmers in printed form.

Recently, I've been exploring generative grammars in JavaScript—partly as research for a project with my students, partly from growing interest in the nuances of language. This work will likely find its final form soon. My aim is to create something playful that deepens our engagement with language broadly. As VERSEVerse seems to understand, language surrounds us, and as it increasingly becomes our primary interface with machines, we would do well to read and listen more attentively to our languages in all their forms.

1. https://theverseverse.com/ ↩

2. https://theverseverse.com/event/reverse-a-poetry-symposium-with-theverseverse-in-london ↩

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo ↩

4. https://www.perlmonks.org/↩

5. https://monoskop.org/images/5/55/Code_Poems_2012.pdf ↩

   
   Photo credit : Andre Baumecker

It has been a long while since I last shared some thoughts and news over here. A lot of changes have taken place for which I’ll spare the details and get to the more important matters. Perhaps the biggest shift on a personal note has been my determined effort to do more artwork. This has been in waiting for a long time and I’ve always been overwhelmed with a sense of frustration for not putting more focus on my own work. I realise that most of my time and attention has been directed towards teaching, an activity that I continue to be devoted to. However, it came apparent that there was an underlying practice that needed to be developed and finally that decision has been taken.

I’m excited to share some news concerning two art projects. This does not mean that the newsletter will become a window for personal advertisement. That is not the idea, so I will continue to share more general as well as more focused thoughts on what I have observed over the past few years as well as what is happening today in the field of creative coding and generative art. A lot has happened and although I have shared in some thoughts with others, I haven’t really written much. That will change.

For now I’d like to briefly present two projects. The first is the making and confirmed publication of my book, Hyper & Cosmic. Containing essays by Adrian Shaughnessy (Intro, Unit Editions); Rémi Forte (205TF); and Simon Renaud (Fonts and Faces, Language as Symbols), Hyper & Cosmic offers an in-depth look into the creative process behind two of my major artworks. The book comes with a limited edition duotone risograph print and will be released this June, 2025. Pre-orders are currently open with a special early bird deal by entering the code, ‘HyperEarly’ on checkout. Further details can be found on the publisher’s page - Vetro Editions. An article I wrote about Hypertype can also be read over at Creative Applications.

The second project is a group exhibition with Galerie Data in Paris that is showcasing a number of new works from my series, Language is Broken. This work emerged from a personal experience with diminishing reading attention and explores the materiality of language, transforming letters, signs and symbols into pure visual form. The exhibition runs from 3 April until 19 April 2025. More details about the show can be read here : Syntax Error.

That’s all for now. Please do share your thoughts. Kind regards.

• New website : mwebster.online
• New social : BlueSky
• Instagram : tisanesound
• Hyper & Cosmic Book. Vetro Editions 2025

Claude Shannon with 'Theseus' Maze-Solving Mouse, 1952. Photo: Keystone / Getty Images

Hyper-Redunancy ‡

"What I hope won't happen is that we are quickly satisfied with technology itself. What is to be hoped for is an interaction of people with technology, rather than a quick acceptance of what technology does. There's so much button pushing now, and the results are so spectacular that there's a temptation, which I hope is avoided, of just taking what the technology gives and not doing anything with it."

John Cage

“In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” This quote, taken from Fred Dretske’s book, Knowledge and the Flow of Information published by Cambridge University Press in 1981 is a poignant reminder of the implicit nature of information that has been with us since the dawn of man. To say we are living an information age today is contrived. In my view it is a redundant attempt to excite the masses, to engender evermore possibilities for marketing ploys, boring tech conferences and ultimately to play herald to the ‘new’. For without something new, like a healthy shopping spree to fill our spiritual glee, it seems we are unable to function. We are living in the hyper interconnected noise machine that updates with spanking newness every nanosecond of the day. The reasons and indeed implications of this spiral towards banal use of information is a complex and perplexing matter. Where have we gone wrong?

The constant search to amass the nugget pile, to express its ‘newness’ and shout out loud with egocentric joy whilst pressing publish, post or tweet from our all too cosy sofas is a chronic state of affairs. Worst still, and for the street paroling or bar crawling paresseux among us, ‘Like’ has become a worrying possibility of ‘self expression’ in the ‘new information age’ blindly presented to us. To think this omnipresent button lived a short life in the lab of labs as the ‘Awesome’ button is thought provoking – for about one second. Obviously, no one ever proposed ‘Wicked init!’. Just as no one dared to propose ‘No more please’.

Reducing social expression to the simplistic act of pressing a button and producing a generation of frenzied clucking clickers is perturbing. Behind this superficial and superfluous hyper-liking trend lies a strategy that doesn’t really have the interests of the people at heart. More importantly, nor does it add anything constructive to the information layer. It is purely a marketing technique concocted to fuel the consumer bandwagon.

This essay is primarily about information in the digital age and how information can be an opportunity as equally as it can be a potential death penalty for our economies, politics and cultures. I’ll begin with a simple prophesy. We will not be a society of cybernetic sheep queuing up by the thousands to sign up to the Singularity. Nor will we be a society living in G+ pseudo open sourced communities and villas, driving to work in the latest update of the iCar V8 to start the day at the office where we labour to feed the system with new content. After a full day of churning out viscous verbosity, we will not be winding down in the evening with friends at the FB community centre. You may well have flinched at moments in reading this and for good reason. For if you share my flinching thoughts on this too, this hypothetical scenario is not a prophesy for disaster. It is practically and unfortunately the current disaster. The car is yet to arrive but it was a concept Mr.Jobs had lined up and you can look forward to its arrival in some form or shape. Are you worried? Do you even care?

Whether you are rummaging the crass, admittedly amusing at times, or exchanging facts with someone across the globe to help build a bridge, the channels of information have become increasingly easy. In the latter scenario I’d like to think that this facility to communicate is a better use of today’s technological progress and its possibilities. Not so long ago, the telegraph and plain old letter were our only means for passing on messages and to remember or at least imagine that fact should put you in the same viewing seat as mine. This ease of communication has an opportunity cost and especially when it is reduced to the choice of pressing a single button often associated with the former scenario.

Making things ‘easier’ diverts the attention needed for doing things that are admittedly harder but invariably more enriching and without doubt more powerful. Our intuition is to follow and ‘engage’ with the crowds in online interactions and communication of information that are set up to facilitate our lives. This ‘online intuition’ is intrinsically linked with the automatic gun that fires hit and miss rounds. It is a cognitive impulsion primed for hedonistic heuristics. It is unconscious smoking of bad weed. Basically, it is hitting ‘Like’ without thinking beyond. This facility with the dominant tools on line, whose selling point is invariably, “making your digital lives easier and enabling more connectivity” is fundamentally a lair to the lions den.

The web seemed to arrive like a whirlwind, for some of course they were born in it and in the future they will be born with it – inside them – according to certain sources. During the heady days of the Web’s arrival, it felt like the new punk rock. Everyone had an instrument and we felt we could all be part of a band. That vision hasn’t changed much, it’s just that we now have the choice between Fender Broadcasters, Gibson SGs or custom made Paul Reed Smiths, all equipped of course with a Cry Baby and Ultra Fuzz – especially noise! However, during that short space of time in which the Web has grown up with version badges to acclaim its rise in prominence and importance, certain forces have taken hold. They have surreptitiously slipped into this realm of the promised land and have become managers of our band. At times they want us to play hymns of happiness and in store ambience when in fact we just want to hang out and play our own thing.

One of those so called managers made almost 37 billion dollars in revenue in its third quarter of 2012. It gained this solely by delivering advertising and strategically placing those on websites, sometimes without the courtesy of notifying the author and practically always without any contracts between itself, the advertiser or the author. According to recent research you’re paying this corporation around $5,000 per annum in personal data in exchange for its services. In a recent official report distributed by the French government, data, and essentially personal data is clearly stated as the current currency of exchange and the major monetary resource of the digital economy. Further more this corporation, as many others, avoid paying a single penny in tax for our work. A point that particularly annoys the French government too. How has this happened?

This particular corporation is the major conveyor of information on the Web today but interestingly, they are not the source of information. They are not the music we compose. They don’t even make music. They are an information technology that streams, parses, indexes and filters. The information passing through these channels eventually finds its path to the lions den. It is the den of data, the lions have been killed off by the way. From this place they are free to exchange with third party corporations, governments and any official and indeed non official bureau with the necessary links. Ultimately they have control of our information yet they have no information. We can safely say they have learnt only one side of information but indeed a most powerful side.

Now, there needs to be some understanding of what the word information means here. In computer science, information is the transfer of a quantifiable message from one place to another. This is how it was stated by Claude Shannon in his groundbreaking work published in 1949, A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon understood information purely from an engineering perspective. It is a mechanism of two states; on and off. The byte is its measure, the machine its vector. From this perspective, our big boss is simply acting as a channel of information. Again it is not a creator of information in the more widely understood meaning of the term. We’ll get to that a little later.

Many psychologists, philosophers, linguists and biologists were fascinated with this new theory of information when first presented in March 1950 at the Conference on Cybernetics. Shannon famously demonstrated a mechanical mouse that could find it’s way through a maze. The system was based on relays attached to the mechanical mouse and by ‘memorising’ its path, it was able to logically make its way to the centre. What people envisioned was perhaps both exciting and, I can imagine, a little worrying. Worrying? Their reactions culminated in one pertinent question; was this after all a machine that could ‘think’?

Interestingly, one severe critic of Shannon’s findings, a past professor of his, Norbert Wiener, took heart to the matter. Wiener is famously considered the brainchild of cybernetics, which in its beginnings was an attempt to question the machine and its fundamental effects on the human. Whereas Shannon was focusing his efforts on the power of the machine, a machine that would later become the computer, Wiener was tentative of this potential power. He was in fact more interested in the man and machine correlation. The interaction between these two had far more reaching implications for the human race as far as he was concerned.

What was particular about “Shannon’s information” was that he purposefully dismissed any concept of sense or meaning. A fundamental part of his theory that invariably riled his critics because the link with information in its more general sense and the implications for developing a machine that had memory was too strong. Being able to store information and simulate intelligent behaviour was all too close to cerebral home for comfort. The rest is general history, the computer was born. Cybernetics became a low key term fizzling out before Wiener could see its rise again in later years. However, the interaction between man and machine is today more in need of attention than ever before.

Information is only complete with its three parts: a transmitter, a channel, a receiver. The machine can work on all three levels but there is an added dimension that takes “Shannon’s information” out of the purely mathematical process. This dimension is inherently human, inherently unpredictable, dynamically complex and unmistakably unresolved. Today, some psychologists defend the belief that the brain essentially only comprehends two states : that of pleasure and suffering. (Perhaps we should create some buttons for those ?) This is of course a vast yet convenient generalisation because the brain wavers between these two states.

For example, our mood on awakening in the morning is essentially dominated by one of these frames of mind,(before we eventually make a decision to rise or take cover under the quilt). What is to be understood here though is that these are but only states of mind at a particular point in time. We twitch with a particular thought that is caught up in one of these. Suffering leads to black holes, pleasure to orgasmic orgies. They are therefore in reality two states that are in a constant state of flux. What happens in between that period of time is far more complex and far more profound than a simple binary machine switching between on and off. On an electromechanical level and getting back to Shannon and his contemporaries, this process of flux in between is akin to noise in the information channel.

“The mind is a noisy parliament of conflicting fractions” says Steven Pinker in his epic work, How the Mind works (Norton, 1997). The complexity of the mind and language in the process of information is what distinguishes the man from machine. If we adopt this rather apt quotation to a view of the Web then you should be able to imagine the meanest bad ass thrash fuzz pedal that ever existed and once you are logged in you’ve turned the fucker on for good. When people talk about information overload they are talking about standing next to a 30K Watt speaker barking out noise. It is incessant and generally not good for the health, even more so for those who adhere to the always on techno culture. Noise is therefore a neat metaphor for understanding what is happening with the web and with information.

This brings us back to our band manager and the concept of filtering. The effects pedal is a filtering process of the signal. In transmitting information effectively and efficiently, we need to filter. To transform that information in to knowledge we also need to filter and it is essentially filtering noise not adding it. Fuzziness is a cognitive state well known to psychologists. It is a cognitive process dominated by uncertainty and in which subjectivity, perception, reasoning and intuition all play their role. Shannon stated in his theory of information that the less uncertain the information the less information we are getting. That is to say, the amount of information is in direct correlation to the amount of uncertainty. Fuzziness and the act of filtering has an effect on the acquisition of information and therefore on human knowledge. This phenomenon happens both on and off line of course, both in the analog and the digital world. However, it is the filtering of these information channels within the digital that needs to be addressed and especially within the context of who is at the control panel here.

On the one extreme then we have a noisy experience when connected to these channels of information. Spam, advertising, notifications etc. At the other, we have dumbed downed button clicking face fooking ‘tools’ that are there to filter the noise and supposedly help us in our journeys and quests online. Funnily both are connected. The more we feed the system the more it spurts back at us noise. Is is personally filtered noise however and again we kind of suck up to that idea as being a technological advancement in helping us. So we buy it.

Let’s be honest though. The people at the top of these various filtering activities don’t give a flying shit. We are mere content drones feeding their damn system. To add salt to the wound here, these people even have the cheek to turn around in times of negative criticism to explain that we don’t have to use their services. It’s pretty hard not too, that’s the answer we slam back at them. Especially, when the only two major computer systems in the World come out of the box with all these services either installed or just a click away – once again the temptation to take the path of facility is but a carrot before our eyes.

That image of the carrot and the donkey is a powerful reminder of how dumb the human race can be. I never said that ok. It is a basic premise of marketing and has its roots with a certain Edward Bernays, father of public relations and propaganda. Bernays viewed the ‘mass’, the people as “stupid”. With that simple assumption, a consumer society was not only constructed but a political policy of fear was installed. The goal was to filter and control the masses. The story can be watched on the boob channel and is a documentary aptly entitled, The Century of the Self.

So where is the grass that is greener you may be asking? Well it ain’t anywhere near this cow patch invested hyper-field of ours. We are going to have to cultivate it. The good news, and you were probably wondering if there was any, is that the seeds for change have been sown but much more will be needed in effort and action to make sure we weed out the crass and keep watering the seeds. And that needs to start in the head and not in the machine. Not with mindless clicking, clucking and twittering. It’s simply a wasted opportunity. Next time you are on the verge of pressing ‘like’, perhaps pause for a moment and think about the various interactions this implies. You never know, you may be detonating a bomb for social disaster.

‡ I wrote this essay in 2012. The reason for publishing it here is because the issues raised are very much still amongst us. You are forgiven for thinking that this has little to do with the ‘creative coding’ scene. However, it was a time when I began to take further interest into the historical issues of a contemporary problem - what became entitled the ‘attention economy’ and has been written about in many recent publications. Algorithms are fun to work with on a creative level but I have always been sensitive to the larger picture of how algorithms play a very important role in how we interact, think and eventually act.

Thank you for reading.

@motiondesign_01

I recently had the opportunity to give a talk here in France as part of a symposium on typography. The event entitled The Shape of Type to Come took place in Paris 17.11.21 and was organised by Simon Renaud. It brought together an eclectic mix of designers who are using programming or system based approaches in their work. When Simon contacted me about giving a talk, I thought it would be a great moment for me to dive into my archives and try to find some common themes running through my work over the past ten years. Little did I realise that this would take a considerable amount of my time to do. Nevertheless, it proved to be an enriching endeavour and it indeed helped in shedding some light on some of the work I have undertook in the vicinity of typography. I’d like to share with you a few of the thoughts that ensued.

Firstly, it should be pointed out that I’m not a typographer. My interest in letters has perhaps more to do with my background in languages and my curiosity for other writing systems such as Chinese. The work I have undertook in the realm of typography is a loose set of experiments in letter form and specifically using code as the main medium of creation. My lecture presented workshops, teachings and odd bits of research, with a particular angle on tool-making for exploring letter form. I started with a wonderful quote by the Hungarian artist Vera Molnar.

“Art at its inception is essentially intuitive. It is at the phase of elaboration that intuition needs control and aid by cognition.” 

The beauty of that particular reference is that Molnar pinpoints an artistic process that I have followed and developed ever since starting to program. From the very beginning, not only does the strict language of code impose certain restrictions, it encourages a methodology and eventually instills a way of thinking. Some may say that programming is counter-intuitive to the creative process and especially when starting out. I see this point of view all the time with my students. There are a lot of hurdles to jump before one can start playing with one’s code and exploring the artistic possibilities. We could say then that Molnar’s words are quite the opposite for creative coders. That coding at its inception is essentially logical and that it is more at the phase of exploration that the logic needs intuition in order for the art to arise. Is this not a plausible take? 

Molnar’s words resonated throughout my talk because essentially it was about this idea of organising the particulars and what I mean by this goes beyond that task of sifting through archives and piecing together parts of a puzzle in order for me to present something coherent and of worth. Organising the particulars really underlines a lot of what I do in my approach and it works at two distinct phases of my work. One is at the conception, where I need to think about the various parameters of a program. The London based graphic designer Paul McNeil puts it really nicely in an interview with Eye magazine, 2017.

“… it’s about restricting your ideas to some very defined set of parameters that are more associated with form-giving than they are with trying to be “creative””.

Again, this neatly emphasises Molnar’s view. An idea needs to be thought out. There are a multitude of ways to do this of course. It just so happens that within the medium of code, you are already in an environment that facilitates a sense of order. The logic of a computer language, its syntax, idioms and the world of algorithms is already a wonderful means of structuring those ideas. Once one begins to actually write a program, another phase takes over. I also call this the organising of the particulars and it is here that I tend to see the flip side of the creative coin. A good majority of time is spent tweaking the system as it were. Changing parameters values ever so slightly, observing the outcomes, then returning to make more changes. It is a constant process of iteration with the program at hand, fine-tuning until one get’s the visual results one can feel intuitively at home with. This is the reversal of Molnar’s thoughts or it is perhaps just the process coming full circle? From that spark of an idea to that moment of aesthetic delight when one can just ‘feel’ that the image before you is right, sublime even!

Whilst I was preparing for this lecture, there were a few points that came to light that I had wanted to conclude my talk with. Unfortunately, presenting ten years of research didn’t fit into the hour allowed and I had to skip. So, I’m sharing them here, albeit in a rather brief manner. I’m sure there are some points that could make for further letters. If you have thoughts or wish to respond, please do get in contact with me.

1). Code is an interesting medium for exploring an idea because it is performative and dynamic. That is to say that what appears to be a fixed, rigid and mathematically precise system, is actually, and more importantly, a language. And like all languages, the semantic field is gloriously vast, extensive, fluid and open.

2). An idea is only as good as the time you invest in it to explore it. Essentially, I have learnt that code is a great medium for prototyping an idea and laying out a means for exploration. However, one need to spend time with those ideas, with the program, in order to observe, question, develop and tease out the best of what it may give.

3). Creativity is more about restricting one’s ideas and enabling processes of enquiry or discovery. Code is also a great medium for this.

4). Generative typography is not mainstream. It is a niche community that ebbs and flows with various moments and perhaps certain fashions. 

5). Tool making is a creative act that has lost its attraction in the graphic design field over the years. This is due to the imposed software that produces and encourages the spectacular and efficiency of pre-packaged ideas. I remain optimistic that in the graphic design community we will return to the ideals of craftsmanship, engage with open source philosophy and re-unite with the beauty of one’s own ideas in an environment and approach that enables one to fully explore them.

@Twitter

Back in November 2013, I had the honour to be invited by head professor Frieder Nake, a well known pioneer from the generative art generation of the 60s, to give a talk at Bremen University of The Arts. The title of my talk was, Looking Back To The Beginnings of Computer Art. Romanticism or Renaissance? At that particular time, I had observed an increasing interest in computer art’s rich yet little known history. This growing attention, albeit a trickle at that time, was manifest first of all on social media, especially on Tumblr where artists were sharing a lot of visual inspiration. There were a few important publications such as MIT’s A Little-Known Story about a Movement and When The Machine Made Art along with one major exhibition (that stuck in my mind) - Dynamo. I sensed that something was stirring, but the burning question on my mind was; if there is a resurgence, was it just a casual gaze or was it a real take on looking back and searching as a means to inform the current creative landscape that was emerging with a new generation of artists? Artists working particularly with Processing and OpenFrameworks and who were exploring the generative with greater ease and with fresh perspectives. My lecture was an attempt to enlighten the path. 

On a personal level, the when and why I had started to look into the past remains somewhat blurry but I do remember the rather sparse landscape before me when going to research the subject on the Internet. Indeed, the only resource that I found was Frieder’s growing collection at Compart. This lack in supply, I feel, instigated a growing demand. It certainly fuelled my motivation, to the extent that I would sift through many a dusty book in second hand stalls in search of the odd computer magazine or some obscure 1970’s publication. Then one day, something popped up on my screen and I was teleported to this all new website and creative coding initiative by Matthew Epler entitled The Recode Project. Well now, this was a wonderfully serendipitous moment.

As Frieder himself so amusingly recounted to me one day, there was a great moment in his office when he learnt about this project that invited people to re-make works from the past using present day tools and languages. “What! They are re-coding, can you believe it! How dare they! They have no idea these young guys.”  Frieder’s reaction was in part one of disbelief - he felt that one could never really recode a work faithfully - but it was also one of excitement too. Excitement and enthusiasm that I shared because I actually invited him over to France that year as part of an event in collaboration with Julien Gachadoat in Bordeaux. And we re-coded together.

So, artists and designers working with the current tools such as Processing and OpenFrameworks were beginning to look into the past and I would say that Matthew Epler’s initiative sparked a general movement towards exploring this little corner of computer history. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that it was an important catalyst to opening the history books. Even Frieder Nake took it on as part of his teachings in Bremen. He also went on to write an academic paper on the subject, Think The Image Don't Make It! On Algorithmic Thinking, Art Education, and Re-Coding

The ReCode Project is an important initiative from my point of view. I’ve had the opportunity to do this particular exercise with a number of my students over the years. The results have always been fruitful and the feedback very positive from both students and peers. What is particularly ingenious about the approach is its ability to tick all the requirements for a quality pedagogical project. It encourages the student to analyse, both on a formal and conceptual level a series of images from the past. This is something that many students no longer take the time to do unfortunately. We are literally bombarded with such visual information these days, that it seems we have put ourselves on auto mode, filtering for the most part the visual pollution and zapping at best those images that may catch our eye. Sitting down and trying to understand an image is a positively engaging experience that I encourage all my students to partake in. The ReCode project is a perfect setting for this. 

Furthermore, it opens the door to possibilities of imagining variations with the tools of today. Once the student has understood the underlying logic and managed to encapsulate this within a program, they are able to explore it in ways unimaginable back in the days. That is very powerful when you think about it because people like Frieder had no such freedom to play really. Their programs were painstakingly written by hand then typed into the computer, the output only becoming visible once the plotter got hot. Nowadays, we iterate back and forth changing parameters on the fly and seeing the outcomes practically instantly. How spoilt we are!

Finally, the added beauty of such an exercise comes with its historical dimension and with more works and artists coming to light and getting the attention they perhaps lacked in the early days, there is plenty to explore and learn from. I feel that the historical context is vital in teaching creative coding these days because so many still feel that the generative is something new. It is, relatively speaking but it already has more than fifty years of history under its belt and if we dig a little deeper, certain strategies such as randomness appear earlier in art. And of course, if we are going to get to the crux of the medium then algorithms take us as far back as 8th century Baghdad and the Persian mathematician Muhammad Ibn Mūsā al-Khuwārizmī. Imagine re-making Islamic patterns with Processing as part of a maths class for teenagers. Now there’s a thought to take the edge off boredom and engage once again the youth in numbers that are not just filling wallets!  

Ah, wallets I hear you say. That is a subtle transitional word for what I will finish on. For those who are following the latest NFT craze, it appears this interest for generative art and its past has been given a second wind. These days, I certainly observe, mostly on Twitter, a lot of banter on the subject of generative art which comes as no surprise because a lot of the NFT gang are using generative strategies or learning them. So, the history books are out again. However, the nature of that interest does at times appear very shallow with some very odd ball shenanigans going on. There is a lot of chaos in the eye of that windy NFT storm and I feel that it will need some serious attention and guidance with lots of open discussion and some dedicated time to digest in order to navigate in the right direction. With all speculative spectacles, the risks are great and many. I personally just hope that we are not forgetting those hard earned values so essential to our being, past down by our elders and to whom we should take heed with respect. Yes, that goes for generative artists too ;––)

Articles, Essays & Publications

I’m currently interested in reading more critical writings on the subject of code and computational approaches in art and design. For those out there who may have things to share, I’d love to hear from you. 

That’s all from me for now but expect an update on some personal work I’d like to share with you very soon. I am always happy to hear from you and I’m responsive to email so please reach out. Reading from my readers is what I look forward to. 

@Twitter

@BitBucket

Happy New Year to all my readers! Apologies for not writing earlier and I do hope that you will remain in touch despite my rather long silence. For this first newsletter of the year, and as a means to make up, I’ve decided to share with you a list of recent findings and resources on creative coding and computation at large. For those who follow me on Twitter, you’ll no doubt recognise some. However, I have dug out some little nuggets from the archives of my memories. I hope they open some doors for thought and get you inspired during these challenging times. 

I’m currently interested in reading more critical writings on the subject of code and computational approaches in art and design. For those out there who may have things to share, I’d love to hear from you. 

Teaching & Learning

I’ve been teaching computational graphic design for almost ten years now and have a number of personal resources I’ve developed for teaching. You can consult my Designing Programs website for a general introduction. From the start of this academic year I’ve been using my Computational Graphic Design Manual as an exercise in my teachings. I hope to share some of the results from this soon along with another iteration of my Tools & Rules Course. That said, I also try to document student work with photos. You can see a selection of print based generative work that my wonderful students at ESAD Amiens produced since 2015 here and some type work here. Inge Druchrey’s Teaching to See which is followed up with an insightful text on Design Observer by Jan C.Almquist is a resource I often consult for teaching some of my courses. Maurice Meilleur’swonderful talk on Jurriaan Schrofer with a diverse selection of examples that dive deep into Schrofer’s typographical constructions. Nicolas Tilly’s stunning Web Animation resource website packed with gold nuggets of info for interaction and motion on the web.

Eye Catching Work

Andreas Gysin’s real-time interactive ASCII art playground. And for those who are even more retro, check Eric F’s Tweets. London based Studio Variable released the powerful nodes.io which beautifully mixes web technologies with a node graph interface. Since the arrival of Axidraw there seem’s to be no let up of generative drawings with this tool. #plottertwitter has become a major trend. The resource website called DrawingBots has recently launched and curates a number of artists and tools. RNDR’s Quarantine Stories and A Digital Ritual. Dance Tonight by the ever talented Jonathan Puckey and Moniker’s Speaking In Pandemic Times. Big up to Leander Herzog’s beautifully minimal web works. For graphic design fans and those who may, like me, enjoy digging into past history of elemental form and shapes, this online archive is a gem. Joel Simon’s Derivative Works presents collaged faces and let me finish off with a machine learning font.

Exhibitions & Events

Art && Code Homemade online. Immaterial/Re-material traces the history present and future of computer art. The highly critical and poetical work of Trevor Paglen’s Bloom at Pace Gallery challenges our views on algorithms. Robert Henke’s CBM8032 is a retro-modern audio visual delight, presented during the CTM festival in 2020. Alchemical by Casey Reas at Bitforms Gallery along with his recent moving image work, Compressed Cinema. Julien Gachadoat’s Lignes was well received and he continues to deliver with the Axidraw. If you are looking for more resources on exhibitions and spaces around the World then The Digital Art Museum is the place to be. The Lumen Prize 2020 winners on video is worth the watch. And to finish off with some typography, check fonts and faces.

Articles, Essays & Publications

Golan Levin and Tega Brain have just published Code as Creative Medium with MIT Press. Tyler Hobbs writes about managing social media as an artist. Sarah Myer’s West writes on AI and The Far Right: A History We Can’t Ignore. Jer Thorp’s Living in Data sees the light of day. Montreal’s magazine Espace takes a look at AI in art. Kyle McDonald has written an insightful article entitled Working With Faces presenting his numerous iterations of critical work in the field of face detection. If you want an introduction to generative AI then OpenAI has a clear article. I’ve been on the search for critical writing and recently came across Nora N. Khan’s Seeing, Naming, Knowing which is a short book on machine vision. How Does A Human Critique Art Made By AI?Consumption And The Machine by Ben Bogart. And least but certainly not last, I can highly recommend an old read (relatively speaking) but one that is full of references in line with computational practices - CreativeAI On The Democratisation & Escalation of Creativity. 

That’s all from me for now but I do promise to be a little more present this year. Ideas brewing as always, it’s creating the time to make them happen that is tricky. I am always happy to hear from you and I’m responsive to email so please reach out. Reading from my readers is what I look forward to. 

As a bonus for those who have read my newsletter this far, Rhizome’s Oldweb.today gives you that back in the days surfing experience. Enjoy and take care.

@Twitter

@BitBucket