Spider Writing

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Block-waving is all about lines. If there’s no lines, then you just end up with a pile of block-waved mush.

I was looking through an old book on my computer. It was a series of scanned, tiff images. I noticed the fine lines in the black and white engravings and instantly opened it up in ShowFoto and block-waved it. As is often the case in exploratory oil exploration or prospecting for gold, the results were disappointing; all it made was a whole lot of (uninteresting) tangled threads.

But I don’t expect these things to work out the first time, so I tried another black and white engraving. This one wasn’t a full page illustration, so it had some text included in the tiff image, above and below it. I didn’t bother to crop the image out and just went ahead and block-waved the whole page, illustration and text.

The full-page tiff images are quite large and I had to scroll down to look at the illustration. I did it so quickly in fact, that I didn’t pay any attention to the part that was just text. Again, the image was just a mess of smudgy bubbles and chopped up bits. But the caption just below it caught my eye:

Weird. Who would ever have thought of applying graphics filters to text? Not even me. But the block-waved text was more interesting than the image; like some sort of bizzare alien hieroglyphics. The words had turned into pictures.

This is what I find makes digital art, and fractal art as well, so interesting: the algorithms often have surprising, creative results and there’s always something new turning up just when you think you’ve seen it all.


“they’ve got a grand piano and they play it loud behind the Diamond Door…”

Some clothing manufacturers in Asia incorporate Western writing, like English words, into the designs on their clothing because it looks nice and gives a foreign look to it. To a Westerner, however, these “decorative” words and phrases can be easily read. To the foreigner, these “foreign” decorations often appear as meaningless, senseless strings of words, chosen, it would seem, for their graphical appearance and nice looking shapes without any regard for what they actually say.

Which make you wonder. What would those Chinese characters used as design elements on Western clothing actually say when read by someone who speaks Chinese? In the West, as in the East, foreign alphabets are used as stylish, graphical emblems completely removed from their usual function of communication.


Already, this new alphabet is evolving

In that sense Spider Writings are abstract art in its purest sense: they represent or stand for nothing, except themselves. In this particular case, abstract writing. Words that are an exact picture of what they describe –which is themselves, actually.


Looks evil, doesn’t it?

The pictographs of our time
made by a computer, naturally
on the walls of digital caves
in the time of the 21st century savage
the Digicene Period

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