Deconstruction of typing as a performance to extract affect

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1669286 (Table of Contents)

Starting form nineteenth century, conveying the information fast and effectively was considered to be the central function of typography. The avant-garde and aesthetically pleasing solutions for the design problems were considered to be negligible because the ultimate purpose was to be succeed in effective communication. However, some early modernist objected these conventions long before digital media arrived. This thesis starts by analyzing the historical development of modern art movements that contradicted with the aforementioned function of typography and employed visually challenging and emotive typographic elements. Later it examines the emerging means of expressions through digital typography, and introduces the related project Moodface. Structure of Moodface is based on the assumption that writing (typing) is performance. Purpose of Moodface is to provide a responsive operational framework in which writing speed data could be collected. It processes time intervals between keystrokes, idle time and mistakes. Mistakes are controlled by ‘backspace’ strokes, time intervals are used to determine speed of individual keystrokes, rolling average speed and average speed of entire text and during the idle time it puts space between lines of text.