Caligraft : crafting computational calligraphies
Calligraphy is the art of decorative handwriting. From a formal point of view we are talking about decorative ways of representing the ideas of glyphs that are in our mind. This same idea can be translated to the domain of computation, the result is what can be called computational calligraphies. This shouldn't be understood as trying to imitate human calligraphies using a computer. It means to use computation to create new representations of fonts, which can be considered as the digital representations of the ideas of glyphs.
This concept opens a whole new world of textual representation. Allowing designers to explore the fields of text recognition and the creation of generative and dynamic typographies. It also challenges the established view of generative art as being confined to abstract representations.
From a font designers point of view, the field of computational calligraphies can help by creating a whole new set of criteria, representations and imaging techniques. These can be very useful in the evaluation of the design of digital typographies, by revealing hidden structural features of the font.
This field will also be of great interest to the audiovisual community by adding new dimensions and parameters in the design of text representation. This results in the creation of typographies that evolve in time and space.
Finally, the domain of computational calligraphies can help break the limitations of expressiveness imposed by the actual system of digital typography and font formats. These standards are very helpful for certain applications where performance and efficiency are important, but there is a need for an alternative tool for more expressive and artistic applications.
In Caligraft I have explored this domain by creating a series of interactive calligraphies using Geomerative and Processing as base libraries. In this project generative art paradigms such as Fractals, Autonomous Behaviour and Particle Systems are applied to the world of Typography.
Caligraft is published under the GPL v3 or later Free software license. All the fonts used in the project are distributed under Free licenses. The entire development of the project has been done using Free libraries such as Geomerative and Processing and on the GNU/Linux platform. One of the main focuses of Caligraft has always been the promotion of Free software and Free fonts.
This project has been shown in several exhibitions such as the OFFF Festival in Barcelona 2006, SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Exhibition in Boston, the COMO building in Seoul 2007, the C-STEM Festival at Turin 2007 and the Ginza Graphics Gallery when it was one of the nominees of the Tokyo Type Directors Club Annual Awards 2007. It has equally been featured in magazines and books such as "PAGE Magazine" and "SPIEGEL Online" from Germany, and "TYPE+CODE Processing for Artists" (2008) by Yeohyun Ahn and Viviana Cordova.
Software:
Geomerative, Processing, GNU/Linux (Kubuntu Distribution)
Artist name:
Ricard MARXER