This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.mobilecube.co.uk/typeart.htm.
G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.
The page may have changed since that time.

MobileCUBE

Typewriter Art

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The automated writing machine, or typewriter, was perfected in the 1870s and went on sale in 1874. By the 1890s typewriter manufacturers and secretarial agencies organised public speed-typing competitions and also competitions for typewriter drawings. Very few drawings survive from this period and as Alan Riddell has put it, this art "denies rather than affirms the instrument on which it was made".

However the existence of these early 'drawings' which could much more easily and successfully have been made by pen or pencil (item 1), contrasts to the work of the early modernists of this century who exploited the medium in its own terms (items 2 - 4). The examples presented here were either produced at the Bauhaus as student 'construction exercises' set by Josef Albers or as in the case of item 4 was published in the Bauhaus magazine when edited by Walter Gropius.

The 1930's were a low period for typewriter art, but after WW2 the Pole Stefan Themerson, living in London, published 'semantic divertissements' which combined visually arranged text with illustrations by his wife, the painter, Franciska Themerson. However a pure typewriter work is included here (item 5). Typewriter art again flourished in the 1960s stimulated by new forms of poetry and literature. But typewriter art of all forms followed. Riddell sees Themerson as an important bridge between the pioneers of the 1920s and the 'modest flowering' of the form in the 1960s.

Unlike the later teleprinter, the typewriter enables the page to be inserted more than once, can be rotated 90 degrees or indeed at any angle (items 6, 7). The carriage advance lever can be enabled or disabled and the paper moved by hand.

Typewriter art is also of interest in relation to the origins computer graphics. Early computers had teleprinters as output devices well before the arrival of more sophisticated printers. Each of these automated writing technologies created a different medium. For the teleprinter the paper only passes once and the control of the mark on the paper is by choice of character and by overprinting of several characters on one letter position (item 8).

Even this freedom of the teleprinter to overprint characters is denied to the text patterns developed within present day word processors, but these can be used in other novel and exciting ways such as Alex Kubacki's e-mail. The latter verges on video which can be compared to our other MobileCUBE current exhibit where multiple sequential images are arranged as polyphotos.

The sheer rarity of typewriter art in the 20th century is astonishing - a Yahoo! search on new year's day 1999 revealed no hits. This was a surprise, not least because from the beginning of the 20th century the typewriter transformed business and (outside agriculture) generated the largest female workforce in history.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

For more information see: Typewriter Art edited by Alan Riddell and published by London Magazine Editions, London 1975. Items 1-5 & 8 are from this source.

------------------------------------------------------------------------