If it wasnāt obvious already this issue of the newsletter contains swearing, specifically; fuck, fuckity, fucking and fucker, so if thatās not your jam I suggest you duck out after the links.
# LINKS
Housekeeping update; work has been full on this week so this is a crunch newsletter, more on that in a second, so try theseā¦
Ahmadās newsletter is great: https://www.gorillasun.de/blog/gorilla-newsletter-94/ and not just because he keeps mentioning me! But donāt forget his whole website is full of great resources too if youāve never clicked back from his newsletter to that: https://www.gorillasun.de/
New newsletter from Jerad, Ink & Algorithms, pitched as āA weekly deep dive into the craft of pen plottingācovering techniques, tools, and the artists pushing the boundaries.ā is also worth subscribing to.
And while youāre undoubtedly already subscribed to Amyās newsletter, she has a new post out: āI want, I am, I do - and other sentence structures | Generative art diaryā with her annoyingly good handwriting stuff.
Which reminds me of āI Spent an Interesting Evening Recently with a Grain of Saltā written by Penn Jillette back in 1991, the āMark V. Shaneyā referenced in the piece being a play on Markov chain. More on Mark V. Shaney; more on Markov chain.
I wrote about my own take in āNotes on remixing Noon, generative text and Markov chains.ā where most of the links donāt work because the post dares to be eight years old. Mind you those links generally point to my things on github so I guess thatās on me.
The above image shows where a Markov chain could have gone down different paths in the āwhat is the next word likely to beā logic.
But I digress, time for a photo essay of sorts.
My wife (being dyslexic and a whole collection of letters) mentioned the other day that she wished that sometimes a newsletter was mainly just pictures, no words. While I canāt quite manage that it is handy in crunch timeā¦
# THE SWEARY STAMPING MACHINE, AGAIN
I wrote about the stamping machine back in issue #55, for more technical details about whatās going onā¦
https://newsletter.revdancatt.com/p/055-supergraphics-stampy-stomper
ā¦this is about whatās happened since.
The āpen plotterā a Bantam Tools ArtFrameā¦
ā¦could hold more than pens, and if I used my rudimentary 3d modelling skills and a 3D printer, I could make pen shaped rubber stamp holdersā¦
ā¦and it would be neat if I could send it a bunch of text, concrete poetry text, lyrics, stories, Markov chains and maybe even AI generated text.
A very slow letterpress if you like, with the bonus of only needing one of each letter rather than a whole tray, handy!
But before doing all that I wanted to check I could feed it words and letters of different lengths and widths and have code ātypesetā the whole thing for me. Which is where the versatility of FUCK comes in. Just FUCK on itās own wouldnāt be any good, as repeating that over and over again (while cathartic) doesnāt give you different line lengths; but a FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCKING FUCKER (7 letters, 7 letters, 4, 4, 7 & 6 letters) both tests lines lengths and somehow still works as being somewhat readable, no matter how theyāre randomly picked.
The ākerningā was off on both of these large tests, but I now had enough info to know it could work and the logic and code behind it (and fixing the ākerningā) would work, so, in accordance with newsletter #056 - How to tell when your art is bad, they got cut up into 16 sets of postcards.
ā¦which along with a zine about the whole process, got sent off into the post to friends (hopefully) least likely to be offended by the whole fucking thing.
On the grounds that now Iāve stopped posting to social media, this newsletter, YouTube and the postal service is how I let people know what Iām doing.
There is every chance I fuck up the next few tries at plotting/stamping, so maybe thereāll be more postcards soon.
# THE END
A quick check of the calendar tells me the next newsletter, which I already know will be about print in the age of generative art, expanding on this idea of code/letterpress should arrive on the 17th of April (2025, hopefully).
And with that, Iām outta time! Here the sun is shining, despite the work and the crunch Iām feeling pretty good, I hope you are too.
Lots of love
Dan
ā¤ļø
I love my fucking postcard! Was not offended by the delivery āŗļø