https://anthology.rhizome.org/reabracadabra
For internet art project, I read about this artwork called REABRACADABRA created by EDUARDO KAC in 1985. It presents an animation of letters on the digital screen of a Videotexto, which, according to the introduction, is “a pre-internet telecommunications network in Brazil that was implemented in 1982”, and is “text-driven”.
The name “abracadabra” is itself a poem, and the artist Eduardo Kac played around letters in this line, choosing the letter A as the main letter, and displaying others in different font-size moving around A. The letter A itself is gradually drawn, tuning with the pace that the smaller letters move and change. Kac was trying to explore the limits of Videotexto platform for its ability to generate and present texts. Below are some screenshots of his project.
It started with drawing the shape of A, which is a bit abstract and hard to recognize at the very beginning. But as it moves on and reshapes the lines, it became much more obvious that what it draws is a letter A. Also, for the small shiny dots surrounding the 3-D letter A, I originally didn’t recognize them as letters, but instead seeing them as starts. It was not until I reread the description of the project did I realize that these animations of the letters are composing a beautiful poem.
The concept of this web art is rather abstract, and it takes time to understand. But it does successfully convey the idea that the letters themselves are beautiful, and can be as attractive as a poem.