• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.6 s.68
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• pp.27-32
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• 2006

TYME is an interactive typography program based on the ephemeral nature of time. It is a text based poetic tool, built with Processing. This project is presented as a performance that utilizes a computer with a display screen, a projector, and speakers. As the user types, white characters appear, flow on the score on the screen and trigger jazz sounds, then characters disappear into black space in several seconds on the screen like smoke. Typography from this invented instrument is evocative and wistful, and allows the user to associate with ephemeral time. While typing the characters as though playing an instrument at intervals of time, the user can freeze the motion and print out or save otherwise fleeting moment with a button. I intend to contain both characteristics: the amorphous shape of smoke and the elusive attribute of smoke for the expression of intangible and ephemeral time. Every alphabetic shape is derived from the video dips that I shot of smoke. The resulting alphabetic images are then programmed using the Processing scripting language and which can then be typed on the screen with a keyboard. TYME could be a model as a project that reflects the unfixed quality of digital typography, and as a design approach for interactive expressive typography by scripting code. This project also represents the characteristics of typographic play, which can be realized in an computational environment like this model.