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Thesis: (load: PDF excerpt)
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The message is the medium is the message is the medium is the message is ...
I started this project from that extension of Marshal McLuhan’s slogan ‘The Medium is the Message’. Beyond the hype of Helvetica I want to profile type and text in the very early era of computational font. So I picked the impact of the transition of the alphabet and script from physical objects to software as the central theme - to explore how typography and writing gets affected by digitalization. The focus is on contemporary trends in design, communication, tools and media.
The type experiments are primarily realized through writing in programming language. They are based on the shapes of a font designed and realized especially for the project and produce two-, three- and four-dimensional vector graphics and tools.
The outcome of this work is a lab-like documentation and visualization in form of realized prototypes and installations.
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“I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.”
“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.”
The quotation above recite John Cage who is well known for his creativity and genius. This might have been a more intuitive statement for John Cage acting mainly in the field of sound and music. Never did people think of asking what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was about - how McLuhan put it once. They did ask though what a painting is about, because before the ‘electric speed’ it was less obvious that the message was not the ‘content’ but the medium itself.
Even though the work can be put in the range of graphic design, I started from a comparable artistic attitude. The works should be done for the sake of themselves. Not to transport a single ultimate brainwashing message but to transport the medium ‘message’ and the message ‘medium’.
I intend to make digital script an issue - how aesthetics and transformations that are based on script (code) affect or reflect on script.
Very often computational type experiments are about the simulation of handcrafts or transformations on screen - I want to picture the potentiality of code for aesthetic and conceptual means rather than deny the tool and the characteristics of the medium.
Moreover I have in mind to create versatile font-faces that can be applied to text or maybe exported for font-creation or used for animation. So the work is no determined project but a step towards future designs. Besides formal and aesthetic intentions I target transporting the characteristics of typography, text and writing semantically and secondarily to support an awareness of the meaning of text today.