Redactions
Joel Swansonen | fr

I vividly remember learning how to write in Kindergarten as I tried so hard to mimic my teacher's effortless letterforms on the chalkboard. In the fifth grade, I forgot to put my name on a homework assignment. In front of the class, my teacher held up my homework and asked whose it was, assuming it was a girl’s handwriting. As an artist, my signature is a signifier of my work and identity. My signature varies slightly with each signing, but it still marks my artwork as unique and authentic. Handwriting is so much more than creating legible letterforms. Handwriting is about identity, carrying norms around sex, gender, and sexuality.

Each year, fewer schools are teaching students how to write, and read, cursive handwriting. All forms of handwriting are being supplanted by digital input devices. The markers of identiy that once resided in handwriting are migrating and evolving within technological platforms Like language, handwriting is a technology, one that is being supplanted by digital input devices like screens and keyboards. The markers of identity that once resided in handwriting are migrating and evolving within technological platforms.

Handwriting is now mediated by the new actor of artificial intelligence. Trained on corpora of human handwriting samples, technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) are setting new norms of machinic legibility. Human and computational practices of reading and writing interpenetrate each other in complex and provocative ways.

I’m curious about the intersection OCR technologies and when I learned how to write. I’ve been processing handwriting samples from my childhood with AI-based text removal software. The output leaves the marks that the software doesn’t recognize as valid language. To create these works I animate these unrecognized marks into interactive "choreographies,” interactive digital works that explore the limits and excesses of machinic reading. Inspired by Cy Twombly and other artists exploring asemic writing, these slow, enigmatically autobiographical works explore the space between legibility and illegibility, meaning and non-meaning. They question the role of language, memory, and technology within the post-Internet era.

This project was commissioned by the l'Équipe de recherche en littératie médiatique multimodale, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2024.