Colophon
Eight ways of putting a single sentence under pressure. Each one takes the same text and subjects it to one operation — spreading it, wearing it away, covering it, turning it, enlarging it, tracing it, blurring it, growing it — to see what survives, and what reading becomes when the text will not hold still.
The sentence is from an untitled text by AG Fronzoni:
“Text has a fundamental role within space, which is independent from its reading purpose. Text fills the empty space. The full space represented by text is the counterpart of the empty space.”
It was chosen because it argues that text is a spatial material before it is a carrier of meaning. Every piece here tests that claim by making the material behave and watching the meaning struggle.
[Expansion] Letter-spacing is a function of position, not speed. A word is tightest at the edges of the frame and widest as it crosses the centre, so reading and looking pull against each other: the word is most present exactly when it is least legible.
[Erosion] Letters drop out in proportion to how fast the text is moved. Scrolling destroys; stillness restores. The sentence can only be read by refusing to advance through it.
[Redaction] The text never moves. Bars of solid black open and close across it at independent rates, so the page is always partly withheld. What is covered is as composed as what is shown.
[Rotation] The sentence is broken into fragments and set on rings turning at different rates. It has no beginning and no end, only phrases passing each other. Reading becomes a matter of catching things in orbit.
[Magnification] A helix of numbered rungs, built in three dimensions and turned on its vertical axis by scrolling. Numbers ride the strands around the back and return on the other side. The hand magnifies whatever it approaches, and the connecting rules give up their length to make room for the digits: attention is shown to have a cost.
[Inscription] Numbers are left behind by the movement of a hand, counting up from zero and fading. It is the only piece with no text at all — a record of gesture rather than language.
[Resolution] The paragraph rests as blurred bands and resolves line by line as it is scrolled, each line staying legible until the whole is readable. Keep going past the end and the same motion undoes it. Reading is work, and it is reversible.
[Germination] The page begins empty. Scrolling surfaces spores, which swell and fuse into letterforms, then return to nothing. Text is treated as something cultured rather than composed.
Every piece is a single HTML file with no dependencies. All state is a function of scroll position, so anything can be stopped, reversed, or linked to. Where a piece has text, pressing T replaces it — hold, on a touch screen — and the new text is carried in the address, so the pieces can be pointed at other people’s sentences.
The pieces that hold their text still will not let it leave the frame. A longer passage widens the measure and, past that, reduces the type until the whole of it fits. Nothing is ever cut off or scrolled away: the page is a fixed quantity of space, and the text has to negotiate with it.
Pressing S saves the state on screen as an SVG. Text is exported as text and rules as lines, with the typeface embedded, so a file opens in a drawing program, prints at any size, and can be outlined for a pen plotter or used as a digital negative. Stopping the scroll is how a composition is chosen; S is how it is kept.
Set in Antique Legacy and Rhymes Text.
[Index] Jon Marsh, 2026