Typing can be thought of as a percussive spatial action—a play of tiny thoughts scattered onto a tightly organized grid. On the other hand, typing is also a kind of speech, spoken through the fingers with flashing rhythms and continuous gestures. Dakadaka is an interactive Java applet that explores these two ideas by combining positional typographic systems with an abstract dynamic display.

Dakadaka was originally conceived by Casey Reas, and developed by Casey and me for Kaliber10000 during the Autumn of 1999. In September 2000, at the invitation of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Casey produced a multi-screen installation version of Dakadaka in which the interactions with a single keyboard were visualized by multiple simultaneous displays. Casey has made a number of exemplary Quicktime videos available on his dakadaka page.