📙 #058 - Rated 15 for swearing & some f***ing postcards
Is swearing in art big & clever? No? But is it funny? No? And has that stopped me? Also no! A photo essay of sorts.
If it wasn’t obvious already this issue of the newsletter contains swearing, specifically; fuck, fuckity, fucking and fucker, so if that’s 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 these…
Ahmad’s newsletter is great: https://www.gorillasun.de/blog/gorilla-newsletter-94/ and not just because he keeps mentioning me! But don’t forget his whole website is full of great resources too if you’ve never clicked back from his newsletter to that: https://www.gorillasun.de/
New newsletter from Jerad, Ink & Algorithms, pitched as “A weekly deep dive into the craft of pen plotting—covering techniques, tools, and the artists pushing the boundaries.” is also worth subscribing to.
And while you’re undoubtedly already subscribed to Amy’s newsletter, she has a new post out: “I want, I am, I do - and other sentence structures | Generative art diary” with her annoyingly good handwriting stuff.
Which reminds me of “I Spent an Interesting Evening Recently with a Grain of Salt” written by Penn Jillette back in 1991, the “Mark V. Shaney” 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 “Notes on remixing Noon, generative text and Markov chains.” where most of the links don’t work because the post dares to be eight years old. Mind you those links generally point to my things on github so I guess that’s on me.
The above image shows where a Markov chain could have gone down different paths in the “what is the next word likely to be” 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 can’t quite manage that it is handy in crunch time…
# THE SWEARY STAMPING MACHINE, AGAIN
I wrote about the stamping machine back in issue #55, for more technical details about what’s going on…
https://newsletter.revdancatt.com/p/055-supergraphics-stampy-stomper
…this is about what’s happened since.
The “pen plotter” a Bantam Tools ArtFrame…
…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 holders…
…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 “typeset” the whole thing for me. Which is where the versatility of FUCK comes in. Just FUCK on it’s own wouldn’t be any good, as repeating that over and over again (while cathartic) doesn’t 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 they’re randomly picked.
The “kerning” 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 “kerning”) 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.
…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 I’ve stopped posting to social media, this newsletter, YouTube and the postal service is how I let people know what I’m doing.
There is every chance I fuck up the next few tries at plotting/stamping, so maybe there’ll 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, I’m outta time! Here the sun is shining, despite the work and the crunch I’m feeling pretty good, I hope you are too.
Lots of love
Dan
❤️