Hypnerotomachia: Excretia
Symposium:
- ISEA2000: 10th International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More presentations from ISEA2000:
Session Title:
- Body I
Presentation Title:
- Hypnerotomachia: Excretia
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Excretia is the first subcomponent of a re-examination of the 500 year old book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – the Hypnerotomachia in our context of technological change. Excretia is a responsive, interactive typeface, dataspace, and information system that morphs in response to a user’s scientifically measurable physical states, in real-time.
The ‘typeface’ is not unified, but is a sampling of many typefaces it elides both the early Renaissance typographers’ desires to reveal the trace of the body in letterforms, and ideas that arose later in the Renaissance – that the bodily responses to, and the visual and material aspects of the text are ‘transparent’ to meaning. The literal connection of Excretia to the body and to phatic pictorial images, and the transgressions of sense through metaphor and wordplay paradoxically reveal our distance from bodily and phenomenological awareness.
