Living Typography
Living Typography is a generative web artwork driven by live Wikipedia edits across languages. Article titles appear in randomly selected typefaces, forming a shifting composition of horizontal and vertical text. Their scale reflects the size of each edit, while colour identifies the language edition. Each title links to its source article, connecting the visual experience to the ongoing, collective construction of knowledge. The piece tests what authorship remains when the artist supplies only the rules of composition, and the content itself is written, continuously and anonymously, by the world.
Research Question
Can the anonymous, ongoing labor of encyclopedic editing become visible as a living typographic composition, and does linking each glyph back to its source article preserve that labor’s authorship, or does the composition’s abstraction erase it?
Medium
Generative Web Application, Live Data Visualization, Typography
Keywords
Live Data, Wikipedia, Generative Typography, Multilingual Systems, Collective Authorship