There are your video calls.
We've seen some yesterday and there's
going to be some tomorrow, and it's a very active genre.
I think you should all realize that what you're seeing here
is in very large part the cream of a fairly large crowd.
One of my favorites is this group every month.
They make these films that are unlike anybody else.
This is one of my favorites, which I just
start and let it go until you guys figure out
what they're doing.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[END PLAYBACK]
I think by now you see what's going on.
It's totally about words that doesn't use any words.
Amazing to me.
I think Tree of Life is a much more longer version
of the same.
This is a really terrific project.
There's an effect called persistence of vision
that allows you to take something very small,
like five LEDs.
And if they're in motion and the computer
is changing the way they light at exactly the right way,
you get this persistence of vision effect, which
is that this much longer thing.
So this guy just does a study on how
to use Arduino, which is a really cool platform.
He built this little vest for the dog
and programmed it to play the entire text of a Cory Doctor
novel.
But could be applied to just about any text
and wouldn't have to be a dog.
I mean, there's all sorts of--
this effect is I guess what I'm trying
to show you is this notion of persistence of vision
allows for a lot of really even guerilla effects of getting
stuff in environments where it shouldn't be.
Because if you had to defend a group of people that were all
wearing these LEDs and standing in a row,
the same effect could be achieved
with the persistence of vision where it wouldn't
have to all be around at once.
You could just basically cycle across them
and they would act as a screen.
These are called entoforms.
These are bugs, creatures that are built by an algorithm
and are printed on 3D printers but they all
take text as their input.
So in a very real sense, you can make your own set of entoforms
from your own words.
This is a visual artist who-- she does--
she's just painting on canvas.
But all of-- I shouldn't say all.
I don't-- I'm not familiar with her entire body of work to say
everything.
But everything I have seen by her is text painting.
It's not it's not incorporating text, it's really just text
This's a man named Richard Aston who--
he's working on the scroll as a format.
He can print it out horizontally if the space allows for it
or if the space doesn't allow it,
he can print it this way where it's an actual scroll
that people have to interact with and roll down in order
to view.
This piece, I like a lot.
And I put it in here with push it off the page,
even though it's maybe technically strictly
just visual poetry.
Because I love the fact that this guy used type from Obama's
campaign and branding.
So this was a decision made that he
was-- that the topography was significant.
And to me that lifted it up off the page.
He's done other portraits of Steve Jobs
and some other people in a similar way.
We have a body, certainly not the page,
which leads us also to tattoos.
Nick-e Melville is a Scottish poet
who had his own poem tattooed under his skin.
There you go.
If it's going to be permanent, make sure you like it.
This is a website that's devoted entirely to people
who have textual tattoos.
There are people in this room with textual tattoos,
I can tell you that right now.
This is a QR code which is becoming
more and more ubiquitous.
So you must have guessed that by now someone
has made poetry out of it.
If you were to scan this, this is
the text of a biblical poem called Translating Upon Air.
The reason Andrew Russ who goes by Endwar
made this piece is because there's
a project called Translating Upon Air
that Nichols started while he was alive,
that was dedicated to as many possible ways of re-visioning
the first poem he ever had published,
which was Translating Upon Air.
Now, we have tattoos in QR codes.
This is a QR code that every time you scan it,
it goes to something different.
He's got a website set up so that when
you scan you go to a website that's got something different
there.
So now if it's permanent, it's at least changeable,
which is an amazing concept from a policy standpoint,
from a curatorial standpoint, from a poetic standpoint.
You could have a tattoo that every time someone scanned
you went to a different poem.
This is a piece by Christian Bok.
Christian Bok is this amazing innovator
in all things textual.
This is built out of--
well, it's cuboid, like other cuboids we've seen recently.
This is different in that, these are actual Rubik's cubes
that have these paper constructions over them
and then they're built into this large piece.
But each one of these individual blocks
could be taken out and turned to represent different text so
that it could be read in all of these different ways.
Christian Bok also has this project
called Xenotext which is right now coming to fruition.
He proposed it quite a few years ago.
And in a nutshell, what he is what he has done
is engineered a virus that stores a text
and then can run operations on that text.
It's a virus, it's a biological bomb.
That's a guy named Jeff Booth, very prolific visual poet
and writer about visual poetry.
He makes-- he makes a lot of different things.
But these in particular, I thought
you'd like to see the snow lifts.
He builds these constructions in the snow,
typically just leaves them.
But in this particular case, it was
snowing so he stayed around and documented its sort of demise.
They also make sand lifts also in the sand,
and that's the way [INAUDIBLE].