The title of this brief observation is a phrase from Imogen Reid’s narrative Fabrication (Nightjar Press) where its content/detail journeys through revisits, repetitions, refractions and revisions to explore ‘alternative forms of readability’.

I am not trying to summarise the process of her writing here, and offer the above as a starting point for relating my experience of and genuine engagement with her narrative piece.

When I first read Fabrication, I had produced a short sequence of TextArt using Terry Riley’s In C as its generated text (as: InC(53) – the number of melody fragments), and I felt there was a shared link to Reid’s narrative, no matter how loose and/or distant. Riley’s use of repetition, loops and transformations certainly seems akin to the process of Reid’s alternative form of readability.

And I’ll leave the (not)analysis there. I shared my TextArt with Imogen on social media and didn’t seem to alienate her! What follows is a personal extension of what I am trying to convey by producing further, prompted generative TextArt poetry.

In this sequence, I used a phrase from Fabrication ‘you oversee layers’. Generative TextArt is certainly about visual layers of developing patterns as well as altering readability (albeit mainly about amount of actual text or alterations where parts of the generated line/phrase might be truncated in transitions). Most of the outcome is entirely accidental, and therefore found, but the overseeing will be in managing the incremental shifts, and also the selection of fonts and colours.

With the following, the transitions are across seven stages (there were more, so this is edited). With social media posts on the oldone and the blueone, there is the constraint of limiting to four images (at times a most useful constraint). Here, there was more room to play…

(clicking on an image will allow you to scroll through the enlarged images)