WORDS, IN ANOTHER FORM

Gallery

Passages, drawn as the paths their words make.
Back to Wordflight

Each picture is drawn from its text when the site is built, so if the way the pictures are made changes, every piece changes with it. The passages here are old enough to be in the public domain. Download them at print size, on the night sky or on nothing at all for printing onto something else.

Passages

  1. Four score and seven years ago, drawn as keyboard paths

    Four score and seven years ago

    Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

    Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, 1863

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  2. Shall I compare thee, drawn as keyboard paths

    Shall I compare thee

    Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
    Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
    And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

    William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, 1609

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  3. Hope is the thing with feathers, drawn as keyboard paths

    Hope is the thing with feathers

    Hope is the thing with feathers
    That perches in the soul,
    And sings the tune without the words,
    And never stops at all,

    Emily Dickinson, Poems, Second Series, 1891

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  4. If there is no struggle, drawn as keyboard paths

    If there is no struggle

    If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

    Frederick Douglass, speech at Canandaigua, New York, 1857

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  5. I went to the woods, drawn as keyboard paths

    I went to the woods

    I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,

    Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

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  6. I contain multitudes, drawn as keyboard paths

    I contain multitudes

    Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself,
    (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

    Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass, 1892

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Examples

  1. Every letter, drawn as keyboard paths

    Every letter

    The quick brown fox
    jumps over
    the lazy dog

    A pangram: every key on the keyboard, once or more

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  2. A path you cannot see, drawn as keyboard paths

    A path you cannot see

    Some walls are real. But a path you cannot see proves less than it used to.

    Possibility Vertigo, a Project Nothing essay

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How are they composed?

A wall gives every word its own faint keyboard, in reading order. A constellation draws every word of a line on one keyboard, over each other, and stacks the lines. The paths are the ones in the player: fixed QWERTY positions, widened curves, a ring where a word starts and a dot where it ends.

The print files are neon. Other looks are drawn in your browser, and their SVG can be printed at any size.