As soon as writing became standardized “text” through the typeset printing press, artists started making images with these prebuilt shapes. Standardized letterforms could be paintbrushes, bricks, sculptures, tiles, pixels, cellular organisms, and ornaments. Typewriter art flourished once the typewriter spread through the world as a business tool: artists, poets, designers, and experimenters like Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Anni Albers turned it into an orchestra of visual production, painting from the keyboard. As early as the 1960s, digital text became a tool, a medium, and a toy to be wielded for graphic means. Artists like Barbara Krueger and Jenny Holzer used the large scale typeforms of advertising and media to blast political messages from gallery and museum walls.

Even now, if you ever come across a fully manual typewriter, the physical experience of typing, let alone making text art with it, is a sensory joy. You have to slam each key with force, turn the platen knob and pull the line space letter in strange patterns in order to move about the page against the machine’s design.

What I love about text art is that it is accessible, inviting. It encourages playfulness and imagination: take that open document and instead of homework, draw something with that keyboard. Text art can be childlike, crude, and humorous. Or it can be a serious extrapolation of scientific or mathematical phenomena. An exacting, methodical superstructure for only the most precise mind. Its cellular nature allows it to be architectural if need be, an art of mosaic. By concerning itself with alphabets and language, text art can be deep social and political commentary, attacking propaganda, erasure, and empire. It is open to motion, animation, or total rigidity—ink on the page, set in stone.

In 2020, branded type screams so often from our clothing the absence of it almost feels like more of a statement than its presence. The air around us is saturated with waves carrying digital text to our devices, and in the code on which they run. Our ability to communicate on the internet depends on Unicode, the international standard for encoding text for every writing system on earth. 143,000 characters purposefully encoded in every one of our inventions for us to use. Each a waiting paintbrush.

Contemporary adventures in text art involve traditional gallery artists, graphic designers, video game designers, software developers, and animators. The following artists and practitioners show the continued vibrancy of tectonic image making across disciplines, borders, and generations.

Pittsburgh-based software artist Everest Pipkin’s “i’ve never picked a protected flower” is a book of “concrete unicode poems,” generated with a mixture of harvested text, editorial constraints, and canvas ASCII planes. The result is a beautiful collision of moods and narratives in what are effectively gardens of text. The words and phrases grow as plants do, out of the wild and into space, bringing moments of chaos and clarity.

Illustrator and writer Rekka Bellum and programmer and musician Devine Lu Linvega make up Hundred Rabbits, a research studio on a sailboat that builds free and open source software, releases games, comics, and other art as they wander the globe. They developed Orca, an esoteric programming language that limits a coder to a single function for each letter of the alphabet. Orca is often used for livecoding, the art of performing music and visuals through programming live. The result is a means of sequencing music that is visually stunning, ASCII art or John Conway’s Game of Life pushed into a hacker dream. The duo also make Dotgrid, a tool for creating text, glyphs, and logos.

Over the course of her prolific career, Tauba Auerbach has wielded text as an artistic weapon alongside her paintings, sculptures, and bookmaking. In one of her first solo exhibitions, “How to Spell the Alphabet," at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, she explored intimate forms of letters and languages, playing with written codes and calligraphy to create canvases and objects. Her letters conjure new dimensions and geometries, aids in her quest to find new colors and ways of seeing the universe.

Language and text are woven through conceptual artist Adam Pendleton’s silkscreens, collages, videos, and paintings. In works he describes as “Black Dada,” Pendleton employs text as language, exclamation, and camouflage, affixing messages onto mirrors to create “Systems of Display,” or spray painting text onto forged steel letterforms.

Throughout the 2000s Korean artist Young-hae Chang and American poet Marc Voge created dazzling flash animations which set screaming text to musical scores. Tailor-made for the Tumblr era that would follow soon after, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industry’s works were a new form of concrete poetry that leveraged the language of design for narrative and lyricism.

If We Were Allowed To Visit is an explorable virtual world made entirely out of text. A “rendering” by game developer Ian MacLarty of poet Gemma E Mahadeo’s anthology, the three dimensional world of letters and words throws objects into new life. Every part of the environment is built from words for those structures (when you discover a cat, its shape is made up of the words “catcatcatcat”). These surfaces reveal sentences, scenes and poetic lines of reflection, emotion, or truth.

Brooklyn-based computer scientist and game designer Ramsey Nasser is the creator of قلب, a programming language written entirely in Arabic. قلب challenges the dominant paradigm of the Latin alphabet in computation, using calligraphy to create structures of connective structures of code.

Finnish designer Heikki Lotvonen is the creator of Glyph Drawing Club, a free web tool for creating texts, glyphs, fonts, and modular shapes of all forms. The result can be used for everything from high end type design to old school ASCII art to whimsical patterned illustrations.

Swiss artists Andreas Gysin and Sidi Vanetti are kinetic art geniuses, building digital and physical works that turn numbers and letters into animated waves and forces that react to sound. Their patterns of dynamically reacting shapes are alive, both on a computer screen or as physical works on magnetic displays fit for old train stations or airports.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen is a writer based in New York City. He is the author of the novel Echo of the Boom.