Andrew Macrae, an Australian writer and artist, wrote to say that although he lives
a long way from the centres of cultural production in the northern hemisphere… maybe there’s something of interest in an antipodean perspective.
Oh my. The man knows how to write a pitch to snare an Irrepressible, no?
So check out his typewriter art (I suspect Photoshop or Illustrator, not an “actual” [or "Real," as Andrew says below] typewriter, but I could easily be wrong; and don’t get me wrong: I respect and admire mimicry): Acid Head War. The thing that grabs me about Macrae’s pieces is the bridge between the dot matrix and the typewriter. All you can see here is the dot matrix; to get the typewriter detail, you need to visit Acid Head War.
What we’ve got here is the translation of photographs into typewriter art-via an algorithm which offers, I can only imagine, a good deal of user control. (Indeed, I suspect that each character is handpecked, but I’m a Romantic.) I have no idea of how many languages Andrew speaks (other than an obvious fluency with English, that is), but translation–or anyway, the engineer’s strategy of bridging–is clearly a forte. In that regard, check out Ordinary Magic, “the ecstasy of everyday things,” a minimalist WordPress blog in action. Read the rest of this entry »