Typestracts
'For the 5 Vowels (U)', dom sylvester houedard. Courtesy of the British Council who I hope don't mind as it was too beautiful not to use.
- [...]on our desk today there lies an open chasm: between pure handiwork and the cleanest mechanisation.
- "the
workmanship of risk" and "the workmanship of certainty".
- How far can the precise form of
the work be guaranteed? How far will there be some play in it, making the
result risky, unpredictable?
- By turning the typewriter to these novel purposes, this typestract uses it
both with and against its grain. It employs its existing regularities and
vagaries, and then introduces new ones. Some of these are very alien to a
typewriter's habits, like the exact but oblique alignments, or the free
drawing. But they're combined with normal typing practices, like the lines
of dot dot dots... The familiar only makes the strange seem stranger. The
typestract shows a medium being put through its paces, and a body being put
through a machine. It sets certainty in dialogue with risk, painting with
text. It stresses typewriting as motion. As dsh wrote: "typestracts –
rhythm of typing – action poetry."
dom sylvester houedard preferred spelling his name in lower case, and amongst many other wonderful things invented the palindrome 'drawninward'. And palindromes don't get much better than that.
For the 5 Vowels (U) is at the ICA now.
