What follows is a sequel to our Guide to Text-Based Art, which highlights 18 trailblazers of art who use text as a central feature of their work. This followup guide, as a cousin to our Guide to Digital and Visual Poetry, focuses on text-based artists who focus on digital outputs for their work.
Before we begin, let’s restate our text art definition from our previous installment:
Text-based art is an art form where language elements play a pivotal role in the composition. Text-based art engages viewers by stimulating their minds and hearts, encouraging them to explore new interpretations and emotional responses to the work. By blending visual, physical, literary, and poetic elements, text art creates a rich, interdisciplinary experience that broadens the scope of traditional art forms.
What follows is a broad sampling of artists who use text as a primary material in the work, but this is hardly a exhaustive investigation.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) is a Seoul-based web art group formed in 1999 by Korean artist and translator Young-Hae Chang and American poet Marc Voge. Known for their distinctive text-based animations, YHCHI’s works are composed using Adobe Flash and are set to music, often jazz. Their animations, presented in 20 languages, utilize the “Monaco” font, which has become a YHCHI signature.
YHCHI’s works are marked by their rapid pace and integration of narrative fragments that reference film and concrete poetry. Notable projects include “Black on White, Gray Ascending,” a seven-channel installation showcased at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2007, and “Dakota,” inspired by Ezra Pound’s Cantos.
Claude Closky
Claude Closky is a French conceptual artist whose work primarily engages with the immaterial aspects of language, using images, text, numbers, and sounds sourced from everyday environments or created in his studio. Rejecting traditional object production and spectacle, Closky’s art addresses issues of visibility and space appropriation, often through humorous and non-political means.
Closky’s early career included co-founding the street artist group Les Frères Ripoulin in the 1980s, which focused on subverting urban advertising. By the 1990s, he had developed a more individual, conceptual approach, characterized by minimalist aesthetics and a critical examination of media and commercial language.
Notable works such as “Envie de” and “Guili Guili” exemplify his use of repetitive structures and deadpan humor to critique consumer culture. His contributions to art have been recognized with prestigious awards like the Grand Prix National d’Arts Plastiques and the Prix Marcel Duchamp, and his work is exhibited internationally.
His 1989 artist book The First thousand numbers classified in alphabetical order is a predecessor to what Kenneth Goldsmith and Christian Bök would later term conceptual writing. Hardly dry and impenetrable, The first thousand numbers triggers an immediate recognition of the absurdity of classification through the effort of organizing one system of organization with another and is a perfect example of Closky’s sense of humor permeating his work.
Damon Zucconi
Damon Zucconi is a New York-based artist renowned for his innovative use of custom software and computer programming to create thought-provoking, internet-based artworks. His notable piece, Multiple (2013), created for the New Museum’s First Look series, exemplifies his approach. This work, a website, links the New Museum’s archived events to a precise counter showing the time elapsed since each event ended, set against monochromatic backgrounds generated from random hexadecimal values. The piece underscores Zucconi’s interest in quantifying history and impact through abstract means, offering a precise yet elusive sense of time and memory.
Zucconi’s work frequently explores themes of vision, literacy, and pattern recognition, challenging the viewer’s perceptual experiences. His projects, often accessible online, such as Boredom is Deep and Mysterious (2019), highlight his engagement with digital media and its potential for infinite interaction. Zucconi’s art disrupts conventional understandings of communication and time, blending technological precision with a subtle commentary on the human condition. His exhibitions, including solo shows at JTT in New York and Project Gentili in Italy, continue to push the boundaries of digital art, emphasizing the fluidity and accessibility of his cloud-based studio practice.
Merchant Coppola
Merchant Coppola is a German-based visual poet and conceptual artist known for his innovative concrete poems that deconstruct linguistic meaning using short text formats inspired by pop songs, advertisements, dada, and typographical errors.
With a background in communication design, digital animation, and creative writing, Coppola has also worked extensively as a VFX artist for films and TV shows. His artistic journey, deeply rooted in a family of artists, transitioned significantly with the advent of NFT-based digital art. In 2021, Coppola launched a series of experimental NFT typographic pieces on the Tezos platform Hic et Nunc (RIP), exploring the visual and intertextual potential of text within the digital space.
Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet, critic, and conceptual artist. Renowned for his pioneering work in conceptual poetry, Goldsmith has significantly influenced contemporary literature and art through his innovative use of language and text. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, a vast online archive of avant-garde art, and has served as an artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
Goldsmith has published 32 books, including notable works such as Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), and his American trilogy The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). His writings and projects often challenge traditional notions of authorship and creativity, exemplified by his manifesto “Uncreative Writing,” which advocates for the appropriation and re-contextualization of existing texts as a form of poetic expression.
Goldsmith’s conceptual art projects and performances further explore the boundaries between art and literature. Notable among these is his project Printing out the Internet, dedicated to internet activist Aaron Swartz, which invited the public to print pages from the internet, resulting in over 10 tonnes of printed material. Another significant work, Hillary: The Hillary Clinton Emails, was exhibited during the 58th Venice Biennale and featured Clinton herself reading her controversial emails. Goldsmith’s unique approach to art and literature extends to his musical collaborations, radio shows, and curatorial projects, including his role as the Museum of Modern Art’s first poet laureate in 2013.
His work, characterized by its innovative engagement with digital media and the internet, continues to provoke thought and dialogue on the nature of contemporary artistic and literary practices.
Christian Bök
Christian Bök, born in 1966 in Toronto, Canada, is a renowned poet and conceptual artist celebrated for his experimental approach to literature. Bök’s most famous work, Eunoia (2001), is a groundbreaking volume of univocalic poetry that won the Griffin Poetry Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. His innovative style extends to sound poetry and conceptual art, with projects such as artist’s books made from Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks, and the invention of languages for science-fiction TV shows.
Bök’s ambitious project The Xenotext exemplifies his boundary-pushing ethos. This bio-art endeavor involves encoding a poem into a bacterium, which then translates it into a protein that forms another poem, creating what he calls “living poetry.”
His recent work Fifty Days at Iliam, minted on the Tezos blockchain, draws inspiration from Cy Twombly’s paintings and uses AI-generated adages transformed into a manuscript by a program created by artist Sarah Ridgley, merging mythic poetry with modern technology. Bök’s innovative fusion of science and literature continues to push the limits of poetic expression and conceptual art.
Emily Edelman
Emily Edelman is an artist and designer with a passion for uniting the NFT and art communities. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a degree in Graphic Design, she spent a decade in experiential storytelling, creating large-scale events and spaces that entertain, educate, and inspire. Drawing on her background in typography and the design of physical spaces, Edelman’s generative work invents new grid systems and uses simple shapes to explore possibilities within strict formal constraints. Her art engages with themes of communication, scale, color theory, and the celebration of the “visible pixel” in digital art.
Emily Edelman’s Reverie series is a deeply personal exploration inspired by her grandmother’s journey with dementia. As her grandmother’s condition progressed, she transitioned from frustration and incomplete sentences to a more instinctual and poetic mode of communication, filled with love and emotion. Recorded during a phone conversation in September 2023, Edelman captured her grandmother’s half-sentences, which, despite their meandering nature, convey a strong sense of self, love, and the desire to connect. The Reverie series reflects the profound human experience of retaining identity and emotional depth even as cognitive abilities decline.
Pierre Gervois
Pierre Gervois is a crypto poet and visual artist who explores the intersection of literature and blockchain technology. He minted his first NFT in May 2021 on the Tezos blockchain, discovering a burgeoning community of poets and writers using the platform to push the boundaries of literary expression.
Gervois’s work leverages NFTs to free text from the constraints of the printed page, integrating it into a broader visual and interactive experience. This innovative approach allows words to merge with abstract images, photographs, music, and voice, transforming the reading experience and expanding the possibilities for literary art.
Gervois is inspired by the potential of web3 technology to create new forms of artistic expression and community. Gervois’s own journey into poetry was unconventional, stemming from his background in visual art and a desire to tell stories through text. His work, deeply embedded with visual elements, challenges traditional notions of poetry and demonstrates the power of digital art to redefine how we interact with language and literature.
His 2022 series, New Conversations, wryly sets various mundane scenes in juxtaposition with the current highly polarized social landscape that is both mediated and exacerbated by technology.
New Conversations I (Religion) by Pierre Gervois
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Lauren Lee McCarthy is a Chinese-American artist and computer programmer based in Los Angeles, known for her innovative works that explore social relationships in the context of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. A graduate of MIT with degrees in Computer Science and Art and Design, and an MFA from UCLA, McCarthy has developed a unique artistic practice that combines performance, artificial intelligence, and programmed interactions. She is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source software that facilitates creative coding on the web.
Her artworks often involve participatory performances where viewers engage in scenarios that highlight the complexities and vulnerabilities of human interaction with technology, such as remote-controlling dates, hosting AI-driven parties, and transforming homes into human-operated smart environments.
One of McCarthy’s notable projects is “The Changing Room,” a networked installation that questions our growing dependence on AI and mediated communication. Installed during the pandemic in winter 2021, this work immerses participants in an environment managed by an AI that asks them to select from over 200 emotions. The algorithm then induces the chosen feeling simultaneously for everyone in the space.
The installation spans multiple areas, guiding participants through meditation sequences, chat conversations with algorithmic interventions, and interactions that subtly manipulate their experiences. By drawing on an extensive archive of online data, “The Changing Room” demonstrates McCarthy’s ability to create thought-provoking experiences that challenge our perceptions of emotion and control in the digital age.
Kalen Iwamoto
Kalen Iwamoto is a Japanese-Canadian conceptual crypto writer and artist based in France, renowned for her innovative exploration of the intersection between art and language on the blockchain. Her work relies on blockchain technology and crypto culture as a foundation, focusing on playfulness, exploration, and experimentation to push the boundaries of conceptual writing, art, and the NFT medium. Through various forms and media, such as micro autofiction, new media poetry, and metaversal art installations, Iwamoto creates new reading experiences that challenge traditional literary conventions.
Iwamoto is the founder of the Crypto Writers Discord and co-founder of theVERSEverse, a blockchain-focused literary gallery where poems are considered works of art. Her projects often involve studying crypto culture and transforming blockchain processes into rules for writing. Notable works include her “Few Understand” series and “Looks Rare,” an interactive performance art installation in the metaverse.
By combining language with digital technology, Iwamoto reimagines the reading and writing experience, creating immersive, media-rich poetry that resonates with contemporary audiences and encourages new forms of literary expression.
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