Partly media archaeological sketch, partly system poetry, this artist book compiles a subjective selection of so-called ›textonyms‹ – a side effect of T9 encoding technology. T9 (short for ›text on 9 keys‹) is a predictive text technology developed in 1995. It was designed to optimize text entry on 3×4 numeric cell phone keypads commonly used at that time. On these standard 12-key layouts the number keys from ›2‹ to ›9‹ are assigned to a group of three to four letters each. In T9, a sequence of single keystrokes is matched against a stored dictionary. Words associated to the entered sequence of numbers are then presented to the user to choose from. Coincidentally and inherent to the working principle of T9, one sequence of keystrokes can potentially represent many different words. This guide book compiles an incomplete and subjective selection of these ›textonyms‹ to be found in the English language. It exposes the collateral poetry, incidental truisms, and semantic comedy that are latently lurking in encoding and compression technologies like T9.

www.jammersplit.de/#t9-numerology

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