NULL MANIFESTO is a facetious take on the task of writing a personal artist manifesto. I initially struggled with this assignment, feeling that writing a manifesto for my current self as an artist was both forced and egotistical. Instead, I approached the task through the lens of asemic writing, where text lacks specific semantic meaning.
Inspired by obfuscation techniques, I considered a reversal of the Dadaist cut-up method, removing words entirely to leave only the medium itself. However, I opted for an approach that retained structure while systematically stripping away meaning. The title NULL MANIFESTO had been in my notes for a while; the concept of null embodies concepts of absence, invalidity, and negation, aligning with my stance on the task. My favorite definition from the Cambridge Dictionary is: “To remove the effect of one thing by doing another thing that has the opposite effect.” In a more literal sense, null also means containing nothing, or only zeros, which defines the manifesto’s content.
Process
- Text Generation: I generated 23 paragraphs of meaningless lorem ipsum text.
- Transformation: Using InDesign’s find and replace tool, I replaced every character with a zero.
- Web Implementation: Each paragraph was copied into a HTML script and formatted using CSS. Large padding and justified alignment introduced disrupted whitespace, creating a chaotic yet structured typographic outcome that dynamically responds to window size. This unpredictable formatting is reminiscent of Concrete poetry, though rather than being carefully composed by hand, it emerged from simple computational processes.