Anthropomorphic Text Francis Lam Sociable Media Group MIT Media Lab

Artist's Statement Computer-mediated communication often uses text for its simplicity, directness, and anonymity. However, real world interaction is enriched with intonation, gesture, facial expressions, eye gaze and other body languages to alter, emphasize or strengthen our spoken words. These subtleties and nuances convey important social and emotional cues that are lost in the digital world. Anthropomorphic Text is a typographic exploration of expressing such cues in a form of kinetic typography. Our approach is to use, what we call, Anthropomorphic Typography, which is a method to create animated text by resembling human gestures and postures. We hope that through the subtleties in body movement-like motions, text is able to convey emotional and social nuances. Our method to create animated text is similar to rotoscoping, an old technique for making animated cartoons. We first film a person performing movements while wearing a big letter attached to a cardboard backing. We then trace the character in recorded video, frame by frame, to digitally re-create the movement. While tedious, this process preserves the human touch through its imperfect movement. The installation consists of a life-size video projection, a keyboard, and a controlling glove. It functions as a simple digital notice board, where visitors publicly leave messages. Users are able to manipulate and animate typed messages by manipulating the glove. The board will accumulate the messages and eventually produce a large typographic landscape textured by distinct anthropomorphic expressions. Downloads - Image - video_LowRes - video_HiRes