My thanks to IT and Rupert for posting my poem here today: https://internationaltimes.it/todays-walk/

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My thanks to paper view books for publishing my concrete and TextArt poetry collection connectstangents. Honoured to be here: https://paperviewbooks.pt/books/connectstangents/

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I enjoy occasional online shopping at near-best-before and/or after-best-before date food stuffs: it is cheap (sometimes considerbly, but beware…) and you can also come across unusual items.

Some of the offerings are termed ‘De Identified’ products. I think this normally applies to generic airline snacks and similar, but there are comical times when there is a photo of a well-known item for this category which includes a rudimentary erasure of the brand name. Not hilarious, but ridiculous.

Thus my prompt for the following (click on images to enlarge and scroll):

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)

An observation on process, revealed gradually

As will be evident to anyone who follows me here and/or on social media, my current favourite creative pasttime is producing TextArt, this often linked to ‘On This Day…’ themed content.

The TextArt is for me a wonderful writing preoccupation, though it may be nearing exhaustion in terms of delivering fresh outcomes. I particulalry like it for its found process – this in the generative transitions from the first design where subsequent formats (mainly through enlargement) cannot be predicted, though the more I work with this, the more I can anticipate. Thus the outcomes are ‘found’ and I always love this surprise and discovery.

Over time I have been able to add variety by using different fonts and playing with the use of colour. I have increasingly explored content through the ‘On This Day…’ information – usually Historial or Musical – and this content can prompt specific font and colour decisions. There is always a full spectrum from the culturally/historically meaningful to the simply comic.

Today’s is a good example to illustrate all of this: the ‘On This Day…’ information is On this day in 1946, ‘Tide’ laundry detergent was introduced in the USA and it is certainly at the lighter end of the engagement spectrum.

Visually, the use of an apt font (couldn’t find an absolute match) and colour gives a close focus, and the generations do provid interesting shapes/forms, especially the first one here (probably 4th or 5th in the original run) which has a tidal, wave-like appearance. The ‘surprise’ element here in the narrative line is the conclusion either on ‘America’s’ or at the actual line-ending ‘favorite’, and I was able to arrive at these two variations more than once and give me the (albeit limited) storyline.

A further and final observation is how the content for today’s TextArt does resonate for me as an American in that being reminded of Tide in a historical context took me back to my childhood where I vividly recalled it being used in our family home/s and in that brightly coloured box. And the potency of the advertising: Tide, for me (as a child!!), was the only and obvious laundry powder we would be using…