John Moore Williams works across visual poetry, asemic writing, digital composition, collaboration, and language shaped by image and machine culture. Books and projects associated with his practice include I discover i is an android and writ10, with collaborative work alongside Matina L. Stamatakis. Across these forms, writing becomes something to see as well as something to read. Typography, image, digital tools, and unstable legibility create a field where language can hover between statement and visual object.
I discover i is an android
The title I discover i is an android places identity inside technological language. The lower-case “i” can evoke a speaking self, a typographic unit, and the naming conventions of digital culture. “Android” brings the human figure into contact with machines, artificial bodies, programmed behavior, and questions of autonomy.
This combination suits Williams’s broader practice because the page often becomes a place where human reading meets technological mediation. Digital composition can stretch letters, layer text, alter scale, or turn writing into image. The speaking self enters a medium capable of transforming the visible body of language.
Asemic writing
Asemic writing uses marks that resemble writing while keeping conventional semantic reading uncertain or open. The viewer may recognize gestures associated with script, handwriting, alphabets, or notation without receiving a stable lexical message.
This condition creates a productive threshold. The marks can suggest language strongly enough to activate habits of reading, while their visual form remains primary. Williams’s work inhabits that threshold and makes the desire to decipher part of the experience.
Visual poetry
Visual poetry treats placement, typography, scale, shape, and page space as structural elements. A word can operate through meaning and through its visual position. A cluster of letters can become an image, and an image can acquire the directional energy of syntax.
Williams’s practice uses this doubleness to keep reading active. The eye may move across a page according to spacing or shape before conventional sentence order becomes clear. Meaning develops through visual arrangement, recurrence, and the tension between recognizable signs and altered forms.
Digital composition
Digital tools offer direct control over layers, fonts, spacing, image files, distortion, and repetition. These possibilities make them natural instruments for a poetics interested in unstable legibility.
A digital page can preserve text as editable language while also treating it as graphic material. Letters can be stretched or fragmented. Words can overlap. Repetition can be generated with mechanical precision. Williams uses this environment to explore how technology changes the physical appearance of writing.
Machine culture and voice
The relation between human voice and machine culture gives the work conceptual depth. Digital writing often passes through software, devices, interfaces, and file formats before reaching a reader. Each layer influences how language appears.
The android figure makes that mediation visible as a question of identity. A speaker shaped by technological conditions may experience voice through systems that are partly external. Williams’s work lets typography and visual structure embody that relation.
Small-press circulation
Williams’s work circulated through small-press and online experimental-poetry networks, including appearances connected with Otoliths. Such environments have been important spaces for poetry that crosses conventional boundaries among text, image, prose, painting, and digital work.
Online and print circulation also create different material experiences. A screen permits scale, scrolling, digital color, and flexible image presentation. A printed page fixes size and sequence. Visual poetry gains different pressures in each medium.
Collaboration
Collaborative work with Matina L. Stamatakis adds another dimension to Williams’s practice. Collaboration places authorship in a shared field where one person’s mark, phrase, or visual decision can redirect another’s material.
This process fits a poetics already interested in unstable identity and layered composition. The final work can preserve traces of several makers while developing a form that belongs to their interaction.
Legibility as spectrum
Williams’s work treats legibility as a spectrum. Some elements can be read conventionally. Others remain partially decipherable, visually suggestive, or resistant to lexical interpretation. The movement among these states becomes part of the poem.
Readers may shift repeatedly between reading and looking. A mark first seen as image may later resemble a letter. A word may dissolve into shape when enlarged, layered, or broken. This oscillation gives the work its distinctive tension.
The shape of language
I discover i is an android, writ10, and Williams’s broader visual practice ask what happens when writing reveals its graphic body. Language becomes a field of marks produced through hand, screen, typography, and collaboration.
The work’s energy comes from the meeting of sign and image. Text remains connected to speech and syntax while gaining autonomy as visual material. Williams turns that threshold into a sustained poetic space, inviting the reader to see reading itself as an act shaped by technology and form.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for other writers working with visual poetry, digital composition, collaboration, and experimental language.