Computational art Explorations of Linguistic Possibility Spaces

A code-critical close reading of two related works by Daniel C. Howe. The artist's Automatype is an installation that visualizes and sonifies minimal-distance paths between English words and thus explores a possibility space that is relatively familiar to western readers, not only readers of English but also readers of any language which uses Latin letters to compose the orthographic word-level elements of its writing system . In Radical of the Vertical Heart 忄 (RotVH) Howe engages with commensurate explorations in certain possibility spaces of the Chinese writing system and of the language’s lexicon. Translinguistically these spaces and, as it were, orthographic architectures, are structured in radically different ways. A comparative close reading of the two works will bring us into productive discursive relationship not only with distinct and code-critically significant programming strategies, but also with under-appreciated comparative linguistic concepts having implications for the theory of writing systems, of text, and of language as such. Throughout, questions concerning the aestheticization of this kind of computational exploration and visualization may also be addressed. His website is programmatology.com

Orthographic projection · Visualization · Writing system · Art, Technology, and Culture · Artistic and Creative Research · Digital Humanities and Scholarship