Kyuhyung Cho: Typeface Design + On-going Showcase
My aim is to develop a new Roman Alphabet typeface inspired by Korean alphabet, Hangul and to extend it to on-going showcase to present typefaces designed by current and graduated students at Konstfack.
In this project, type design will start with analyzing Hangul in its whole and in its parts and setting basic parameters that define the structure and the characteristics of both Hangul and Roman alphabet. Besides, since I plan to develop Roman typeface for body text, I will focus on a rigorous concept and reading quality while incorporating the aesthetic qualities of Asian and western alphabets. This project not only embodies the formulation senses of Hangul, but also explores unique characteristics of the Roman alphabets to the realization of its ultimate goal of providing a new Roman typeface with Asian perspective.
As a second part of this project, I'd like to develop On-line showcase to promote new typefaces created at Konstfack. In particular, the On-line Showcase will present the typeface I will develop for KU project as the first typeface and become a tool for continued curating and showcasing the typeface design by current and graduated students from Konstfack to communicate with public more lively. This in return, will serve as a forum of discourse and academic research on different typeface, creating valuable opportunities to expose and introduce cutting-edge type design to the public. Moreover, in the long run, this proposed platform will serve as a pivotal point in a great advertisement of Konstfack as a research-based university where scholars will find knowledge, research data and create further collaboration with in and beyond.
Rikard Heberling: Errata: Swedish Typographic Histories
This research project addresses the subject of typography and its relation to nationalism, and how this relation is constructed and reinforced through history writing. The project is mainly concerned with examining and partially rewriting a dominant narrative of ‘Swedishness’ within the history writing of typography and typeface design in Sweden during the 20th century.
Can these tendencies within a specific typography discourse be discussed in a larger context of nationalism, nation branding, and preceding historical currents of attributing innate bonds between the Swedish ‘national character’ and visible (printed or written) language and its form? Further, how are these notions – of roots and heritage, cultural and national character – present in contemporary typography discourse in Sweden?
Other questions discussed within this project include: How can a history of Swedish typography be written differently than the dominant narrative? What other typographic histories aren’t visible due to the highly national-cultural focus that the dominant history writing presents? Can typographic histories be written through archaeological practices, by treating and examining letterforms as historical artefacts? How can historical ‘dead’ typefaces be utilized in order to contaminate or promote either dominant or marginalized typographic histories? How does the archaeological act of typeface digitalization affect and transform notions of history? What are the politics of revival typography?
The research will result in a publication as well as a revived/digitalized typeface, with the purpose of supplementing existing dominant narratives of Swedish typography.
Nathalie Wuerth: Be Ware
The vacuum cleaner, a familiar household object, is the vehicle of the project BE WARE.
From an observation of the repurposing of the vacuum cleaner in the era of the Internet and within the frame of immaterial labor, BE WARE constitutes the vacuum cleaner as an object of industrial and post-industrial production and addresses themes related to the voice, the home and work.
While becoming more and more automatic, the vacuum cleaner dispenses itself of human assistance and leaves the factories and the conveyor belts, to reappear in home maintenance as soundtrack.
Roger von Reybekiel: Texts Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art
Texts Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art explores how contemporary artists use text in their creative processes. The project and publication focuses on artists' writing and examines the thoughts, ideas, and techniques that structure an artwork. The publication features thirty Nordic and international contemporary artists and writers that have contributed examples of how text informs their processes. Texts Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art is a form of sourcebook for artistic writing, which provides deeper insight into artistic writing in general, and grants public access to otherwise closed rooms: artists’ physical and virtual notebooks, text documents, folders and drawers. These rooms contain unpolished, often unfinished artists’ writing, and illuminate what’s sometimes lost in the editing process. The pages of the publication contain good and bad ideas, and sketches for work both finished and unfinished (perhaps forgotten or discarded). It presents a snapshot of the stage in the artistic process when the work has not yet landed in its final form and still is in motion. Participating artists' and writers include, amongst others, Cory Archangel, Emily Wardill, Darren Bader, Lucie Fontaine, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tamara Henderson, Hanne Lippard, Tris Vonna Michel, Mara Lee Gerden, Magnus Bärtås and Audun Mortensen.