Star Dot Star
125 Years of Glyph-based Art in Print

On View at the RISD Fleet Library
15 Westminster St, Floor 1
Providence, Rhode Island

August 24—December 13, 2026
Reception September 17, 6:00 PM

Reception panel discussion at 7:00 PM with guestsBen Sisto (OPEN), Kevin Driscoll (UVA), Gabriel Drozdov (RISD), and Dan Wood (RISD).

openforever.org
library.risd.edu

What is it about images made from text? Take any system built for encoding language, and eventually someone will make visual art from it. It happens independently, over and over, whenever a technology gives people a grid of marks to arrange, or a poetic rule set to explore. 

2,300-ish years ago in the 3rd century BCE, Greek poets explored Technopaegnia (loosely, “art games”), in which poems were shaped to form pictures. From here, we can draw a line through history that intersects George Herbert's pattern poem Easter Wings (1633) and the formal naming of Concrete Poetry by Eugen Gomringer and The Brazilian Noigandres group in the 1950s. Today, the aesthetic persists across literature, design, and arts both folk and fine.

In parallel, the craft of needlepoint is dated to ancient Egypt, some 1,500 years ago in the form of canvas tent stitching. Follow this thread and find cross stitch, the technique of folk “samplers.” In the oldest surviving sampler (Jane Bostocke, 1590s) we clearly see the underlying grid-logic that informed typewriter art, which emerged soon after Remington’s typewriter landed in the 1870s. Artists like Flora F.F. Stacey distributed works widely via newspaper, helping to popularize the movement, while Linotype (1884–86) operators began exploring the machine's ability to set decorative borders and figures. London’s Battley Brothers produced works so detailed as to feel less from the 1890s, and more in the 1980s. The 1930s through 1970s then saw an explosion of typewriter art, glyph-based images on teleprinters, and early fax machines, informing subsequent works in early computing. Minimalist ASCII-drawings of Snoopy began adorning computer science labs on university campuses, and in 1982, we officially got the :-) emoticon from Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon.

In the networked decades that followed, artists like the prolific Joan G. Stark (jgs) produced widely-shared ASCII art that calls back to the lighthearted, humorous scenes of cross stitch. Hacker teens in the BBS scene promoted their software piracy with ASCII logos inspired by hip hop and graffiti culture. Today “ASCII art” has become an umbrella term to describe these aesthetics broadly; it can be found in all corners of art, design, and pop culture. Perhaps because text is inherently a spatial artifact before it's a semantic one, or perhaps because we just like to bend the rules, it seems that no matter the century, no matter the technology, we love making images from glyphs.