'Oulipo' was a group of french writers and mathemeticians who wished to create restrained techniques to encourage a more creative ands alternative outcome to a problem. It is through formalism, automated and rule monitored process that new surreal outcomes can form. The Oulipo created a variety of techniques and some unique works from them:
Avoid lipogram - Georges perec wrote a whole novel without the letter 'E' called Avoid. He finds alternative words to avoid using the letter 'E' in his work making for creative language.
The prisoners constraint - A member of the Oulipo Jono Lewarne created this as a way to write a lot on a small ammount of paper. To do this you have to remove acending and decending letters 'b' 'd' 'f'' 'g' 'h' 'j' 'k' 'l' 'p' 'q' 't' 'y'.
Palindrome - words that looks the same forwards and backwards; level, boob, madam and refer.
s=+7{N+7} - everytime you find a noun in the text, find it in the dictionary. count down 7 nouns and substitute the word for the new word. unexpected and fun method of substituting. ( try it myself )
These kind of practices went on to influence future writers and graphic designers to create more interesting techniques:
tree of codes - Jonathan safran created a new book ontop of an existing text. He removed words he didnt want to keep or found arbitrary and from this produced a new text from the pieces missing and therefore gave a new context to the overall message in the book.
Personal Task
Morpholo is a visual game created in 1985 as part of the oupeinpo which is exploring restaints to make a creativite image collage on tiles. The game is of making the pieces of a giant image that follows a set of constraints. You made 256 tiles. Once you have got them you can play the game. Creates unexpected visual outcomes. Part of a 3D space.
The anatomy of a morpholo tile: 4 equal sided. 8 half edges 2 pers edge of the side. Each of the 8 half edges is coloured either black or white - represented as on/off yes/no true/false 0/1 comparable to booleans. Once you have made 256 tiles with the correct variables you can then have the fun of making your own connected images facing blacks to blacks.
I was tasked to find and copy fonts I liked looking at serif, thickness, shapes and curves and from those I would get details from these fonts to create my own version of the morpholo tiles.
I started by replicating standard fonts as a way to get used to drawing fonts and cursive. I then got an algorithm of codes for the tile shapes and proceeded to make as many fonts as I could fit the rules of the morpholo.
This task is a fun way at looking at alternative approaches to text. Sometimes a methodical and numerical system of order can create a suprising and fun new concept/result. This is something to keep in mind in my own work as I can use algorithms or data on work pieces to create a contextual, craft.
