After I posted the following experimental sketch which consists of several digital versions of the same found image, Catherine Banks sent me a fantastic article about Color Dot. She said, “I think this must have been made just for you”.
From the article which is about a typeface that has been designed to turn all alpha-numerical symbols on a webpage into coloured dots: “Martin Grasser is the man who gave us the Twitter logo, and Martin Grasser is a man on a mission to generate a version of the internet in which words cease to exist. Color Dot — a newly launched plug-in which is currently only available for the Firefox browser — is that internet.
The idea was simple: create a typeface which automatically converts alphanumerical characters into coloured dots. The execution is delightfully odd: rendered as nothing but colour, Grasser forces the reader to consider their relationship to language.”
and
“Now, not to get too serious here, but the internet isn’t always the friendliest place. Misinformation runs riot, hatred swells, and you’ve got to put up with seeing meme after unfunny meme retweeted into your feed 24 hours a day. All of which can make one of mankind’s greatest inventions feel like little more than a system in which hostility and irritation constantly find themselves taking centre stage.” (Baines, 2019)
Of course, I can’t for the life of me find the plug-in that is mentioned in the article but even so, it’s good to know it’s out there and apparently there will be more versions soon too – it’s great to see that the formal threads I have been pursuing are legitimate concerns and being explored by others quite so literally.