If there’s one philosophy that was fervently brandished by the art students I went to school with, it’s that text has no place in art and any worthwhile art piece shouldn’t need text on it to get the point across.

But, can text itself can be artful?

With the rise of web2.0 technologies, tag clouds are springing up all over the web on blogs and in a variety of mashups.  In addition to providing quick and interesting information at-a-glance, I find them to be quite beautiful. I’ve seen Wordle, in particular, twice since Obama has been elected – once on the web after his inauguration speech and another just last week during a mini-state of the union style address on CNN. readwriteweb.com wrote an interesting content comparison post that compared the speeches of several past presidents and immediately shows the overarching themes.

Another neat textual art project is TextArc, a program that demonstrates the relationships between words within a text. I highly recommend checking out the analysis of Alice in Wonderland. Similarly, Visual Thesaurus provides a visual word definition and relationship view. Check out the word list for Carroll’s Jaberwocky to see it in action.

Beyond the containerized context of a specific written work, you can see the commonness of many English words at wordcount.org, which uses size to represent how frequently a word occurs.

I’m sure there’s many more neat text-based art projects on the web. If you find any, please comment and leave a link so I can check them out and bookmark them. I created a neat analysis of 100 spam emails and subject lines between March 13-15 with wordle. Conveniently, it’s somewhat pill-shaped.

Hello and welcome to Dedd Pixel.

What’s a Dedd Pixel?

Well, a Dedd Pixel is a blatant misspelling of Dead Pixel, which is a term used to describe a defective LCD monitor pixel that remains unlit. It is also the name a fictional band that my friends and I had in college. In a programming class, we were AlScSh and the drum machine, then became Flux in our Electromagnetics class, before transforming into Dead Pixel for reasons unknown. We finally settled on Dedd Pixel after realizing that truly edgy bands misspell things. Since the band is fictional in the first place, I’m using it as the name of my artBlog.

What is the intent of Dedd Pixel?

Although I rarely have time to create art, I still love to learn about art. So while I don’t necessarily create a lot of art, I do read about it and bookmark/link to it. This blog is intended for me to share some of the neat art-related websites and news that I find. I may stray at times and talk about politics,  food, or my cats, but the main focus will be on art that relies on the internet, gaming and technology.  I can’t guarantee how often I update; I’m aiming for at least one post a week but am finding that nothing promotes procrastination more than a schedule.

Who are you?

I’m a web developer. I graduated from CU Boulder in 2004 with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a BA in studio art. I have several avatars; this is one of them.