History and References.

XraysMonaLisa was a writing project I started in 1995, its roots date back to experiments around 1990/91, a desire to have an monolithic, abstract, non-linear and incremental approach to writing, where I could splash text-particles like Jackson Pollock, continuously revise a la Willem deKooning, and work within a seamless-void (bounded only by the margins of the medium) as per Mark Rothko. My fascination with punctuation and other minor particles of language had a lot to do with all of this.

 

My website was to showcase one end-product of this work; those versions have yet to (re)materialize online.

 

Then there are acrostics and mesostics. Here are some more.

 

 

I don’t know if Marinetti’s manifesto A Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature had any influence on me, but I wouldn’t discount it. Other fragments of futurist manifestos have popped up in my notebooks out of the past; I enjoyed reading about the Futurist, Dadaist and Surrealists during the gestation phases of this project.

 

 

tyranny of the grid?

There is something ironic in my goal of flinging words and letters to liberate them from the tyranny of the narrative line having an end-game of a rigid grid of punctuation.

 

 

notebookerie

From 1992–1996 I filled notebook nigh-obsessivly - the notebooking was ironically inspired by this digital project, in the absence of a computer. But in that absence I found plenty — grid-texts in receipts, the typewritten word (and letters, and punctuation, of course) and others.

 

 

ATM and other receipts, for instance

(source)

 

 

See Also

 

 

 

This is a portion of Reference.