Translating “Character” in Digital Character Art
Published by Jeremy Douglass June 25th, 2005 in Text Art.
AI-Tech (”Artificial Intelligence for Information Technology”) recently reviewed us as a “siti interessanti” (the site is Italian) - reading their review made me realize that the word “character” in our mission statement is ambiguous.
While I was reading the AI-Tech review of WRT I noticed they had a wikipedia link to “Digital Character Art,” which actually led to an entry for “Digital Character” - not as in text, but as in persona, particularly a 3d visualization. I would probably have linked to “Character (Computing)… but then, the slip between “letter” and “person” does make sense - we talk about chatbots and IF as if they were Dramatis Personae. This isn’t a question of AI-Tech not understanding our focus, which they clearly do, it is a question of nuance and emphasis - perhaps that is why I prefer saying “digital text art” to “digital character art” anyway. This probably calls for reflection on the etymology of the word “character” and how that connection is being rewired. The Yahoo Emoticon Contest” has me thinking that Neal Stephenson’s age of mediaglyphics might be at hand.
While I agree that someone mistaking us for a site about digital personae rather than digital art goes against our intent, I think that it would be out of character for us to close off that interpretation as one of the many readings of our site’s purpose. We study character (letter art), character (person) art, and character (qualities of) art. Why not let the meanings play out across our postings?
Fair enough - although I wonder whether the legibility of “text” is the distinction I care about - Unicode contains many “characters” which are nontheless illegible to me.
Put another way: if Not My Type had been constructed using a huge set of wingding fonts, they would technically be “characters”, but the coolness would be gone, because they wouldn’t actually be text, compiled as image - they would be unitary character images, making up a larger image.
So. Digital text art… is a large subset of our main focus, digital character art?