Ariel Malka is a Paris-based designer and programmer who has spent over two decades developing chronotext, a body of code-based experiments that treat text as a visual and interactive material.He builds real-time typographic animations and touch-driven reading interfaces for the desktop, the web, and mobile devices, exploring how written language can be manipulated on screen.,,
His early chronotext works include Babel Tower, begun in 2003.In 2005 he published Sketchbook on the book, a series of sketches mapping the biblical Book of Isaiah onto a virtual landscape, proposed as a concept for an extension of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The Israel Museum commissioned a permanent chronotext work in 2006, and Javascriptorium opened there in 2007.,
Babel Tower became the first chronotext iPhone app in 2010.He liked thick word soup, published in 2014, let readers manipulate the text of James Joyce's Ulysses by touching and dragging strands of moving text, several simultaneously on tablets, built with the Cinder framework and the open-source chronotext-toolkit.,He followed it with TextNoise, an app for playing with text and generating sound, released free on the AppStore in 2020.,Malka has minted most of the chronotext experiments as NFTs, beginning on hicetnunc.xyz in 2021,with the works accessible via Teia.He also cofounded theseed, a quarterly zine for generative art on the fxhash platform, with the artist aetherdada.
In 2022 he created a website presenting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in five different ways of reading, made in response to challenges to human rights protections in the country where he lives.The following year he collaborated with Gary Barwin on A Thousand Temples.In 2024 he released The Untangle Game, a mobile game about untangling a fishing line while practicing catch-and-release fishing, and made the major chronotext experiments available as open source.,
