illarterate biographies

Use any you like! :-) -- Dan

Illarterate is a multimedia artist from Wigan, UK. Despite attempts to modernise, he will forever be known as 'That Guy That Does Teletext Art'. But whoever said that's a bad thing?

Dan Farrimond (illarterate) is a multimedia artist fascinated by retro technology and its associated aesthetics.

As we enter the Internet Age, teletext as we know it is in the last throes of its operational life. How will it adapt, if at all, to a constantly shifting technological climate? Will the internet be its saviour, or will this final bastion of a bygone age be lost to the annals of time?

If teletext is to go the way of video games arcades and audio cassettes, it certainly won't be forgotten. It is the grandfather of 21st century computing with hundreds upon hundreds of tales to tell, all on a 40 × 24 character grid.

Dan Farrimond’s work focuses on design within limitation, particularly in the transmission of electronic information, and the subsequent effect on meaning – to what extent is the original message distorted by these restrictions?

Dan Farrimond is a multimedia artist from the United Kingdom. It wasn’t until 1998, when he first travelled via aeroplane, that he discovered the country wasn’t actually made up of blocky pixels as shown on the teletext weather map. Ironically, that holiday was also booked on teletext.

In an attempt to right this wrong, he adopted a new (or should that be old?) genre – analogue teletext art. To this day, he is still searching for the perfectly cubical rock to build a blocky Britain.

Dan Farrimond (UK) claims to be a teletext artist, but is in reality more of an experimenter. Though he purports to be a multimedia designer, his methods are best described as 'slap it down and see if it works'.

(Written by Mistfunk)
Dan “Illarterate” Farrimond is indisputably the great master of the teletext visual art medium of our era – if not of all time. Not a silent titan of an extinct art celebrating privately in obscurity, he champions it as its technological irrelevance deepens (something we fans of ANSI art can appreciate), curating historical highlights and acting as a critical outreach locus for others interested in being involved with the further possibilities of this curious (apparently) dead end.