Andrew Badr's Homepage

Asemica is a generative algorithm that creates typographic compositions. As traditional asemic writing is to handwriting, Asemica is to typography: it creates asemic writing by the hand of a machine. The algorithm composes abstract shapes derived from letters and symbols into new characters based on carefully tuned aesthetic rules. I did this project in 2021 in collaboration with Emily Edelman and Dima Ofman. A limited series of outputs was released on ArtBlocks.

Deconditioning Stickers (2015) are stickers that look like the notification count indicators from Facebook, Instagram, and other apps. We're all being conditioned to notice and tap on these numbers. By placing notification imagery into new contexts, Deconditioning Stickers are meant to undermine that conditioning, or divert its energy for better purposes.

Initially created for my final project at SFPC in 2015, I went on to develop the second iteration seen here. Sticker sheets were distributed in NYC and mailed to participants around the world.

Your World of Text is an infinite surface where people can write and overwrite each other in real time. You can scroll in any direction. It's a creative space, confessional booth, and more. You can also make a private "world" for yourself or you and your friends.

Launched in 2009, Your World of Text remains one of the most popular internet art projects, with over 100,000 visitors per month. It's saved someone's life, inspired other artists, and been featured in new media curricula. In June 2020, the podcast Cult or Just Weird interviewed me about the project.

The deterministic finite automaton is a simple model of computation studied in computer science. Following an office hours discussion with Prof. Lenny Pitt at Illinois, I pursued and eventually solved a nice generalization of the classic DFA minimization problem. The results were presented in my paper Hyper-minimization in O(n²) at CIAA 2008.

Since then, the concepts have improved and extended by other researchers.

In one of those coincidences of discovery, a professor in Slovakia found some of the same results at the same time. We ended up co-publishing another version of the paper as well.