I’ve been doing some experiments with typographical projections onto a mathematical 3d surface. This comes from some thoughts I had after reading some basic work on topology. The idea is that a given constructed body of text — or even collection of ideas, can have a different inferred meaning depending on one’s situation to the piece.

Click and drag for fun! The original model was created in Mathematica, then exported into Maya for textures and rendering.

In these particular examples, if you were sitting within a gully of the Sine wave you would see a completely different grouping and arrangement of words then if you were sitting on one of the corners. To say that one is more correct than the other is besides the point, the piece is as it is. If we wanted to see the passage as the original authors intended we would have to view it directly from above — something which may not even be possible for our little inhabitants. More so, depending on a particular viewpoint the arrangement of originally unconnected words could well be logical and create meanings completely unintended but nevertheless just as real as the sentences in the original text.

But for my purposes, I think the images are interesting in their own right. The lines of text drag the viewers eyes along the curves of the terrain. That it’s hard to read any more than just a few words in a given image causes a bit of tension and you tend to just concentrate on certain word groupings. The text is used more as a decorative element, something that is completely familiar but in this context deformed and abstract.

In case you’re wondering the above text is an excerpt from The Futurist Manifesto, 1909. They did some pretty interesting things with typography.