Why is some text-based art so badly written?

Scrawly writing and spelling mistakes are common qualities in text-based art.

Why would that be?

Maybe it’s to indicate that the text isn’t mediated by the boring, rational, non-creative parts of the brain that strive for order and neatness, that it’s 100% impulsive, that it has bypassed the deadening effects of the higher brain functions.

The messiness of text-based art is meant to convey emotion rather than the rationality which is closer to the inherent qualities of text as a medium.

One of the ironies behind messily written text-based art is that the artist is possibly injecting the messiness into their writing in a conscious, stylised or mannered way, almost as far removed from unmediated spontaneity as you can get: “Which word should I put the spelling mistake in? Which letter should I make randomly upper case?”.

That’s what I do when I work in a scrawly style anyway.

In some ways messy text-based art exhibits a cousinship to automatic writing. With automatic writing the idea is that the person doing the writing isn’t in control of what is being written: that the writer is merely a conduit for some other force or entity that has entered the writer’s being and is guiding the writer’s hand. Automatic writing can therefore be rather messily executed because the person who is doing the actual writing isn’t 100% in control of their actions (and maybe also because the inter-dimensional connection with the other-worldly force or entity which is guiding the hand is a bit crackly). Of course for this to be valid you have to believe in automatic writing, which I don’t.