a (too) small project (no budget, short notice) of mine is concerned with
handwriting and installed at a brief presentation of mainly typeface
designers. If you look at the hundreds of new digital fonts published over
the past say 2 years you notice the emergence of a lot of expressive fonts,
that 'show/perform' unevenness, like handwriting, mutate, etc. Some are
even proper 'hands' [Letterror (two Dutch typeface designers who also did
the reknown Trixie ragged typewriter font) did their hands, a left and a
right hand), there's Signature Software that claims to have issued over
40.000 individual fonts after people's hands, fonts that change in context
to (no, not yet meaning, but it'll come) adjacent characters.
My interest in hands was triggered almost two years ago with the Duchamp
Regular and the Duchamp Bold...
>demographics can also write fluid maps,
>maps as fluid as the self-contained oceans that we are.
demographic's learning; you mention learning at the end of your parallel
post, Eve, and a learning paradigm is so important. the way things are
dynamic (_not_ just after the WWW), and (my hope is always)
anti-institutional at any scale or moment, learning is a true condition.
>I am thinking now of these maps I saw once made by some island peoples of
>the South Pacific (...)
>What was foregrounded in these
>maps were the currents, not the islands - the interstitial spaces.
Imagine an eskimo mapping snow...
>The most fluent collaborators I have encountered thus far have been
>the senior people in the neighborhood, those over seventy years old who
>remember different patterns and metascapes that escaped the contemporary
>map-makers. They are an integral component of the
>audience/collaborators/authors of this work.
This project sounds really like 'programming' (cultural, social, political)
conditions, in order to have 'images' emerge, re-emerge from the past,
reintroduced, actualised(?)... interesting -- programming is not about
forcing or ruling to bring rigid objects about, but about animating,
evoking interaction. The programming artist i imagine is inclined to
allowing feedback informing the work. With every new work you
(participants) feed the environment and its rules, change the rules, feed
new data, change perspectives and at the same time offer support for the
explorations by multiple audience/collaborators/authors.
Jouke Kleerebezem Amsterdam
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