The word acronym comes from the greek akros (tip) plus onym (name), but the word has an uncertain history. It was possibly born of war: the OED has no mention of the word until 1972 (and places its origin in 1943). Of course acronyms existed before the word used to describe them (for example, Louis Aragon's 'FMRL' - 'ephemeral' - in his Paris Peasant of 1924), but it was not until the last quarter of the 20th century that acronyms began to dominate everyday life, with companies, organisations, and even individuals using sequences of letters to represent themselves.

The brevity, speed and impact of acronyms gives them a particular value in the current age, a value which reaches beyond the symbolic in the hands of organisations who desire the most efficient implantation of 'brand'. The process has been further accelerated by the gold-rush and subsequent exhaustion of short WWW addresses; by increased use of abbreviation in e-mails and chatrooms; and by the explosion in mobile text messaging (SMS) that has occurred in the early part of the 21st century, which by limiting messages to a small number of characters helps fuel a practical need for a common language of abbreviations.

Acronymphomania uses a process of aleatory dynamic motion and text generation to suggest the continuing qualitive changes in the speed of our society, and the fetishization of letters that occurs through abbreviation. Stylistically it is indebted to the morphological and spatial manipulations of the Russian Futurists, particularly Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who were the amongst the first to observe (create?) the fetish of the letter.