A studio practice of typewriter drawing with language, and a Twitter practice of simultaneously writing and publishing at 140 or 280 characters at at a time.

On Language Drawing

The language drawings began some years ago as a secret project, withdrawn and hidden, a studio game with no rules. By using the word “drawing” I was trying to evoke for myself an activity that didn’t need to argue or account for itself. It could be just that, an activity, something done for its own sake.

I started the language drawings with a cheap manual typewriter and long rolls of paper. There was a bit of the romance of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” scroll, and of the half-fantastical story of Frank O’Hara standing up and typing poems at a model typewriter outside the Olivetti store during his lunch hour. The early rolls are 20 feet long, made over the course of days or weeks. 

Since then I’ve moved to other typewriters, other kinds of paper, and into digital language spaces like Twitter. In so doing the language drawings have slipped the bonds of their privacy and found forms of circulation.

As of this writing there are currently 887 Language Drawings on Twitter: @language_drawing