A few years ago, I gave an artist talk at my alma matter in Indiana titled What Am I Doing? Over the past couple of years, I've continued to ask myself that question. This week, however, it's been a question that rears its head on an almost hourly basis.
Currently, I'm in the middle of thesis-making and explorations, and have confirm the question "What am I doing?" is relevant no matter what state an artist or designer is in (unless we're not making at all...which is a sad, sad state).
Context: While I'm not necessarily interested in re-presenting type or letterform, I'm curious how type-like forms can function within that environment. When you remove context, what does type become? Below are a few visual explorations I've been running down this week. In order to dial in my exploration process, I chose to use a phrase from my Sony headphones instructional manual "Handle the driver units carefully" which has very little meaning on its own.
Grass keyboard: Using a grass keyboard as a tool to interrupt the typing process, I attempted to type "Handle the driver units carefully" to see what sort of results I would get
Laser cutter as a tool for interruption: In some ways, text is an artifact of language, so I chose to explore what artifacts could be made from type and see how those artifacts operate in a similar context. The image above is a long exposure shot of the laser while cutting "Handle the driver units carefully"
Combining all letters from each word in the phrase in an attempt to create an image that stands in place of text
Examining artifact: Over the course of 3 hours, I took a shot every 30 minutes of the shadow created by a laser cutout of the phrase. My goal was to merge the shadows together and see what sort of result appeared, but as is sometimes the case, the experiment seemed to fail.
Rules for combining the letterforms typed from the grass keyboard.
The end result of the combined letterforms from the grass keyboard with the phrase "Handle the driver units carefully" in yellow for comparison.
Another attempt at shadow as artifact: I created a mobile of the individual letters from the phrase and attempted to capture the shadow in order to find results that could stand as letterforms.