In Search of Birds

via Bob Grumman's po-X-cetera (Review of John Byrum's Screens)

By drawing lines through the rows and columns, one would produce the screens of the book's title. The piece Byrum has designed from the Kafka quotation thus both describes and exemplifies the main procedure of. his book, which is the sending of cages after birds, screens after words, form after content. . . art after meaning.

The Visio-Textual Classification of Pseudo-Languages and Similar Constructions

via Bob Grumman's po-X-cetera

In the summer of 1988 I gave a presentation in Madison, Wisconsin, sponsored by Xerox Sutra on that art in which the verbal and the visual are more or less equally important and which I am now calling visio-textual art. Toward the end of the presentation an intellectual saboteur (Liz Was, I believe, although my memory is hazy, so traumatic was the experience) confused me by asking how I would classify such things as invented languages.

Review of Karl Kempton's precincts of the 5th apocalypse

via Bob Grumman's po-X-cetera

precincts of the 5th apocalypse is an ambitious series of 18 frames which appears as a section of karl kempton's book, black strokes, white spaces, which was published in 1984 by Xexoxial Editions when it was still calling itself Xerox Sutra. Each of its frames contains an image constructed of identical typographical characters. Together those images dramatically relate the gradual decay toward final destruction of present-day civilization.

Visual Poetry as Epistemology

via loudbuzz sounding off

In "visual poetry" the only "lines" you may want to either memorize or "de-code" are not words, but lines in a drawing. What kind of intelligence is this? What can drawings or images really tell us about the order of the world?

Report on Geof Huth's Visual Poetry Reading

via Shin Yu Pai's Makura no Soshi (Reading given in Boston on 4 Aug 2004)

Geof introduced the audience to several forms including the algebraic poem, the ambagram, the acemic, and the eye chart poem (which incidentally I have also been experimenting with in Nutritional Feed). I went absolutely crazy over the birches and snow poem, haven't seen/read anything that exciting in some time.