TEXT ONLY HOME PAGE

Led by Sasha Kurlyka

This peer learning / skill sharing session is for multi-disciplinary artists who are interested in exploring text-based computer art / web interventions. An algorithm is control: it is completely defined and knowable (even if it is not known in practice). But then it meets reality: combinatorial scale, or randomness, and it is no longer controlled. This session is a space to discuss and reflect on our experience of and encounter with existing media, particularly text, in digital spaces; and for multi-disciplinary artists to consider how web-based text artworks or interventions could (or already do) fit into their practice.

Structure :

• Computer art minus computer: Input from historical and current examples of non-computational algorithmic art and writing; in context of genres of text-based work, including combinatorial poetry and ASCII art
• Cultivating critical and creative readership: Reflection & discussion exercises for “reading like a writer” as an approach to both creative writing and working with web-based text art as a medium
• Making, sharing, and documenting an interactive text-based web intervention: No prior experience with web as a medium or code is required, though interest is a plus. Session includes a walkthrough using neocities for web hosting a static site with HTML and plain JavaScript to create an interactive text-based intervention, and then the ffmpeg tool to make documentation of text with screen recordings much smaller. If you have specific requests to include a particular other related tool, please get in touch!
• (This session will not cover generative AI or LLMs, these topics are out of scope.)

Resources:

Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism https://smallfile.ca https://kurlyka.neocities.org/campus