Star Dot Star is a collection of glyph-based art and design spanning about 155 years. Think typewriter art, teleprinter / RTTY art, ASCII, and concrete poetry.

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. 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.

This collection is also, truth be told, born from a bit of that ol’ toxic impulse, nostalgia. We recall the BBS-era of the 1990s; text-based games and Razor1911 .nfo files. Art packs from ACiD and iCE, and so on. Back then in the DOS days, when you wanted to view all the files in directory, you’d type in *.* (star, dot, star)—hence the collection’s title. Sort of a catch all for the various genres and sub-genres found, and yet to be discovered :-)

Select items from this collection will be on view at the RISD Fleet Library, August 24–December 13, 2026. All the info is here.

-=-=={ ASCII }==-=-

-=-=={ Concrete Poetry }==-=-

-=-=={ Typewriter }==-=-

-=-=={ RTTY / Teleprinter }==-=-

-=-=={ Needlepoint }==-=-

-=-=={ The Rest }==-=-

OPEN is partnering with RISD’s Fleet Library to present an exhibition of select materials from the collection. Star Dot Star will be on display from August 24 – December 13, 2026. Click here for the full details.