how?

use the menubar at the bottom to select an acronymph. you can view them in any order. on each page you are encouraged to click anything you see, text, images, even blank spaces - by clicking you will influence the construction of each dynamically generated and unique acronymph. alternatively, use the menubar to select each acronymph in order and view the linear development from A2Z.

 
what?

the linguistic origin of the word acronym is the greek akros (tip) plus onym (name), but the word itself has an uncertain history. it was possibly born of war: the OED has no mention of acronyms until the 1972 supplement, which places their origin in 1943. acronyms certainly existed before the word used to describe them, but it was not until the last quarter of the 20th century that acronyms began to dominate our everyday lives, with companies, organisations, and even individuals using sequences of letters to represent themselves.

the brevity, speed and impact of acronyms gives them a particular value in the current age, a value which reaches beyond the symbolic in the hands of organisations who desire the most efficient implantation of 'brand'. the process has been further accelerated by the gold-rush and subsequent exhaustion of short WWW addresses; by increased use of abbreviation in e-mails and chatrooms; and by the explosion in mobile text messaging (SMS) that has occurred in the early part of the 21st century, which by limiting messages to a small number of characters helped fuel a practical need for a common language of abbreviations. but this language is not as new as it seems: louis aragon used 'FMR' for éphémère (FMRL/ephemeral) in his 1926 book 'le paysan de paris' (paris peasant), a technique familiar to all txtrs, and marcel duchamp used similar letterplay throughout his career.

acronymphomania uses processes of random text generation and dynamic motion and to suggest the continuing qualitive changes in the speed of our society, and the fetishization of letters that occurs through abbreviation. many of the poems are created through the limits imposed on this random generation, as well as by the form and motion of that generation, as an experiment in constrained writing. stylistically it is similar to the work of early modernist artists, including the morphological and spatial manipulations of the russian futurists, particularly aleksei kruchenykh and velimir khlebnikov, who were the amongst the first to observe and further this fetish of the letter.

 
who?

babel - www.babel.ca

 
when?

poems 1995-present; this piece last updated 11/2006