Words as Material (studies)
2023-2026. Generative animations, JavaScript
Studies in which a text is the building material of the image, not its subject.
- Research line
- L1
Often in my work language goes into a system as input and something else comes out. Here the word is the brick: the letters are the material the image is built from, and the text chosen decides what can be built with it. Some of them run as animations, and none is finished. This is one of the directions I am working in now.
One Million of Something
2025. Generative animation, JavaScript
Burroughs's sentence, language is a virus from outer space, written exactly a million times, until the writing becomes a surface.
A City
2026. Generative animation, JavaScript
The streets and the volumes are the words of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Nothing is drawn: the text is laid out until it stands up as a city.
The Waste Land
2025. Generative animation, JavaScript
A single line, drawn with the words of Eliot's poem. The words follow the path; the letters stay apart.
A Linguistic Cellular Automaton
2026. Generative animation, JavaScript
A semantic cellular automaton, where letters and words appear and disappear under deterministic rules. Nothing decides what it will say. The rules decide what survives.
Building with Words
2025. Generative animation, JavaScript
An architecture assembled from the text of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture, 1923. The manifesto that argued for the house as a machine, used as the material of one.
Order Disorder
2026. Generative animation, JavaScript
Black and white fragments swap places and turn until, from a chaotic start, they begin to compose a line of Heraclitus: the most beautiful order is like sweepings poured out at random. The clarity of order holds just for an instant, then the algorithm runs backwards, again towards entropy.
Heraclitus, c. 535 – c. 475 BCE.
