Here’s a poem I found by poet/storyteller Rives:
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If you can’t figure it out, here’s the link to him performing it live: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/rives_tells_a_story_of_mixed_emoticons.html
It obviously works a lot better as a live performance (It’s obvious that certain parts don’t fit perfectly, or would be indistinguishable otherwise), but at the same time I found it really interesting how he decided to illustrate this piece using only letters, numbers and punctuation.
The theme of the story is that there are at times limitations to the spoken language—a guy sees a girl he wants to talk to, but doesn’t know what to say. Instead of saying something generic, he decides to try and convey his feelings in his own unique way, and because of this the girl is left puzzled.
The illustrations, on the other hand, do the exact opposite. Letters, numbers and punctuation—the building block of written language, are essentially only symbols (similar to what we’ve discussed in class and read in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics). Because they are symbols, they don’t actually “mean” anything. Therefore they have the ability to convey more than the role assigned to them.
For example, when Rives writes this *\o/* it does not mean “asterisk, backslash, lowercase O, solidus, asterisk,” it means cheerleader. When Rives writes (_)3 it doesn’t mean “parenthesis, underscore, parenthesis, number three” it means coffee mug. No one could say “parenthesis, underscore, parenthesis, number three” and think “coffee mug” without first constructing the image (_)3. There is really no actual relationship.
Rives’s performance of this “typographical fairytale” is not just a simple poem or story, but a commentary on language, communication and symbolic capacity.
These are pretty interesting takes on visual representations through text. As you noted, though, it does lack something without the meaning behind it. It’s an abstract art that, like much abstract art, I’m sure many people would be uninterested or confused by. Still, I think it’s cool that this is actually taking the shape of a narrative through the symbols. I think a lot could be done with that if it were refined, and I’d be interested in seeing where it goes, or could go. Though not quite the same, you may be interested in ASCII art, which I think we may have briefly mentioned in class. It’s the construction of images with type using different characters to provide the desired effect. There is some pretty extensive stuff out there–some even growing into short movies. I believe, in fact, there are ASCII converters that will take pictures or clips and turn them into text. It’s cool.
For an old, yet awesome collection of ASCII art, check this out:
http://www.chris.com/ascii/
You can see how complex things, like the Animaniacs, can be turned into detailed images, while things that seem simple, like “Compact Disc” can still be very intricate.