(non)material text – Page 7 – A project on the art, acts and technologies of writing, editing and publishing

22 March 202013 April 2020

Retro computing: Word 5.0

With the return of Covid-19 yet again in Hong Kong, this weekend was spent entirely at home, retro-computing. I installed Mini vMac, a classic Macintosh emulator and installed the Macintosh II ROM with System 7.1, and downloaded a whole bunch of obsolete software that I used in the 1990s. A lot of fun.

I’m writing this blog post in Microsoft Word version 5.0, what I used to write on my first computer, an LC475 that my parents bought me in 1993, running System 7.1. I rummaged through my old CD-ROMs and found a folder titled ‘Old floppies’. I found, to my horror (delight?) my GCSE coursework in Word 5.0: ‘Macbeth by William Shakespeare: the theme of ambition in the play’, ‘Napoleon: the ‘Animalist in Power’ (a response to Orwell’s Animal Farm, written and formatted like a newspaper article), ‘A political assassination’, ‘The rime of the ancient mariner’ (an interview based on the story) and ‘To what extent do national newspapers reflect all shades of public opinion?’. I realised that I didn’t really take up writing seriously as a ‘thing’ until I started using a word processor (I did learn word processing on the command line BBC Micro though but didn’t really take it seriously until I had my first Mac). Something about the fluidity of word processing that allowed me to explore ideas without committing them as tangible marks on paper. The freedom that everything I type is only but tentative was a key factor I reckon.

Typing now in this extremely low resolution Mac emulator is quite nostalgic, especially using this bitmapped version of Geneva 12, the default in the system text editor Teach Text. How I became productive in such a low tech digital environment back in the day is a bit hard to believe. It was also on this machine that I learned desktop publishing in PageMaker, and also PowerPoint (where I produced an ‘interactive’ school prospectus) and other things like Photoshop (version 2.5) and Illustrator.

During University I moved onto WordPerfect 2.1, which I found to be a much more sophisticated word processing package than Word was at the time, even though it was already somewhat outdated. I also found a bunch of stuff I wrote back when I was studying for my undergrad degree and could open it natively on the emulator.

Student exercise: text generation tech

These photos are from around 2004 when I was teaching at Emily Carr in Vancouver, Canada. Students chose from a selection of quotes on typography and asked to typographically articulate them using different technologies: handwriting, typewriting, stencils, dry transfer lettering, computer. They first used them separately and later combined them. They were asked to examine the resources available in each technology for differentiating text, and of course acknowledging the constraints. From the hacking of the quote they created a small saddle stitched ‘manifesto’ of sorts, quarter legal size, saddle stitched, photocopied.

14 March 202013 April 2020

Where is this project going?

This whole project came as a spur of the moment thing. I don’t know where it is going and where it will take me. And that’s okay. The ideas I have been percolutating for a long time. The ‘stream of conciousness’ is an accurate description. Each post are only marked by a time stamp without a title. That was intentional – an effort to strip the text of any meta-data that describes its semantic structure. The genre of a blog was also intentional, as it presents the ideas in reverse chronological order by default. I have not been an avid Tumblr user at all, but my guess is it attracts a certain audience and has a slightly perculiar feel to it (I don’t know what it is and can’t say I understand it much). Instinctively I thought it would be suitable platform for the project. The template is also a bit ‘default-looking’ which kind of works. Georgia was a concious font choice, what I usually write in (as I am writing in Georgia now in Byword). The fact that this template doesn’t show a full timestamp was semi-intentional – having the time as a relative measure (eg 30 minutes ago) makes sense as well.

I sort of half-intentionally don’t make the text polished (hence the use of contractions like ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’), and leaving typos uncorrected. I tried not to go back to edit past posts, but have hopelessly failed. The typos still bother me.

As for publishing, every post is in effect ‘published’, but also evolving. But I have also been exploring other dimensions of publishing – fixing the text in a PDF, ‘designed’ (whatever that means), making it available for buying on lulu.com as a print-on-demand publication, and leaving the text published yet ‘open’ as a Google Doc – are some of the experiments so far. Representing the unedited, unpolished text with a ‘designed’ look was to raise the question of ‘when does a draft become a published “work”?’ Because sophisticated typesetting technology is now available to everyone, the boundary between a draft and a published work has dissolved. This might have something to do with the loss of the author’s ‘aura’, or their ultimate ‘death’. The RGB colours were intentional, playing upon material/non-material.

Let’s see what other ideas I’m going to toy around with.

(written in Byword in a small restaurant in Shamshuipo)

12 March 202014 March 2022

Writing in longhand

A page of handwritten text written on an iPad

K 3 how I won) material text
As I hmmm mentioned in my last part, writing by
hand shows me down. For a attain job that I applied
for in the past, as part of the htt mining process,
☹i☹
there was a milton test. It had been qm
agowhthzhadtotaktomtxovm.Iwnsgirensen.my
pieces of lined paper and a question sheet with
three essay questions, and for each quest in the
required word cnnt was 350, which I was told 2
had to meet or else 2 mmol automatically be
disqualified. All under the time pressure of an hour
???t.tt#nanitiT;mi:mmiiaEIi:rn
kept writing, writing whatever came to mind
about the topic-basically writing down my
stream of urns aims mess, free writing if y m
will, with the role aim of making the mind cmt
within the time limit. After I reached about two-
thirds of the page down, I stopped and counted the
number of words to tour. I figured I had to fill
the page completely for each question. 2 then kept
writing non-stop until the time was up. what a
horrible experience! I did get the job, but still
fail to understand why they wind n’t provide
a computer. Perhaps they wanted to oral rate
my handwriting?!
I AI like writing by hand, but not for writing
From, why for taking notes, planning, or
getting ideas down. The main reason being the
ability to structure ideas spatially, free from
the linearity of word processing.
(on my iPad Pro) on
2 am writing this in the fantastic grrdwotes-app.HN
design and build built in Hong Kong. I started
n thing this app a year and three months ago,
and have never gone back to paper notebooks
since. 75 o pages so far!
# handwriting#non txt#note taking#writing
# editing#publishing#mThig☹#writing tech
[the body of the then blog.soh-isinpntvia
handwriting recognition in good notes, unt din’d I