The Artist Who Sent Handwritten Calligraphy Text Messages For One Week

I just wrote an article earlier today about smiley face emoticons and whether or not we’re all really smiling when we send those. Maybe those smiley faces have morphed into meaning something else, or maybe we just send them out of habit. Typed digital communication is very different than traditional handwritten communication, and I don’t just mean in the way we compose the words. There is a whole different set of norms depending on which one you choose.

It may be a moot point to bring this up since most of us don’t hand write notes anymore anyway. Whenever I write something with a pen or pencil, it feels strange and dated. Writing the analog way seems almost like an art form these days. I even read a while back that some school are going to stop teaching children how to write in cursive letters since those traditional handwritten alphabet letters are so rarely used anymore.

Imagine what it would be like to go for a whole week and only send handwritten, calligraphy text messages to your friends and family. Instead of using emoticons and auto-correct, you’d use an old-fashioned pen with black ink. Of course, to get those analog notes to your friends in a digital way, you’d have to take photos of them and text them as images. That is exactly what artist Cristina Vanko did for a week. She wrote:

“I wanted to create my own modern day version of snail mail. My rules for this experiment were simple: create handwritten text messages for 7 days, i.e. no using the keyboard on my phone to send a message. I wrote out my messages on paper and then I snapped a photo to send as a text message.”

I bet that was a fun (and time consuming) experiment. Since I can barely write anymore, I have no doubt I would have to rewrite some of those text messages a few times. The question is, if you did this experiment, would you be able to live without your smartphone keyboard, digital emoticons and auto-correct for a whole week? I think I could, but I wouldn’t last much longer than that.