Ambigrammia : between creation & discovery / Douglas Hofstadter.
| Author/creator | Hofstadter, Douglas R., 1945- author. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication | New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, [2025] |
| Copyright Date | ©2025 |
| Description | xii, 306 pages : illustrations (black and white, and colour) ; 26 cm |
| Subjects |
| Contents | Olivieromaggio -- Ambigrammia's shaky start -- Pioneers of ambigrammia -- Creative perception -- Two early exhibits -- Cheating and reading -- Chunks and low-hanging fruit -- Playing in Peoria -- Snippets from AMbigrammi -- Cousins of ambigrams -- Ambigrams in new venues -- Ambigram renaissance -- A surprise for Dr. J -- From the early 2000s -- Zologrammes à Paris -- Couplings -- Michaeliana -- Cognitive science and music -- Unigrams and multigrams -- Six (or so) impossible things -- A phalanx of fine physicists -- E pluribus unum -- The August Lulu -- Why this book? Why now? |
| Abstract | "In the 1960s and 1970s, a trio of imaginative individuals independently discovered that ordinary words and phrases could be given double readings by playfully distorting the letters composing them. These doubly readable words and phrases, if designed by an artistic eye and hand, could possess great visual beauty. Douglas Hofstadter named such calligraphic creations "ambigrams," and over the decades he has designed thousands of them, as have his friends Scott Kim and John Langdon, the other main pioneers of the subtle art form he calls ambigrammia. ABCD (Hofstadter's informal title for this book) offers a sampler of hundreds of Hofstadter's ambigrams, along with a few dozen by Kim, Langdon, and others. With deep links to cognitive science, ABCD exhibits ambigrams of many types and shows how ambigrammia can be extended in surprising directions. All along the way, Hofstadter discusses creativity and its alter ego, "discoverativity," revealing how the "pocket sized creativity puzzles" that constitute the art form are pervaded by these complementary qualities. ABCD is also notably autobiographical: Hofstadter vividly recounts how his life has been intimately intertwined with the creation/discovery of ambigrams in many countries and in many languages." -- yalebooks.yale.edu. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN | 9780300275438 |
| ISBN | 0300275439 |
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