texts and txts

I got sidetracked this week by the re-birth of email newsletters. The right ones can be great – a kind of mini-magazine you can stack up to read at leisure. I like Smashing Magazine for tech, Storythings for cultural catch-up. But the choice is very personal: the NY Times Top Ten were not my cup of tea, very culturally specific.
 
But I did find a great analogue/digital mash up in one of them: calligraphy texts. There’s something very delightful about the images of texts and the reactions to it: “It’s like you’re deaf“. I’ve written about mash-ups before, but it takes a while to work out how to bridge the analogue/digital divide, like working out the best way to photograph words for messaging texts.
 
I’m in the same boat, currently working through a thick GIMP manual, for my next project. (I need the stability of a physical book, with my annotations and post-its, to learn something complicated.)

I’m trying to digitally flip-flop from a piece I made at college: Psalm 23 in Welsh written across the horizon of Bethesda, seen through 36 webcam shots through dawn and dusk. The analogue version is a long string of images: the writing’s sometimes ink, sometimes scratched through the surface. (You can see where on the horizon came from…)
 

Even looking at the two pieces in images here on the blog they are going to be very different… it’s heartening I suppose that even a picture of a photo print of a webcam looks so different to a animation of a screen copy of it (if you see what I mean). It’s not just resolution.