“Signing” by John Sherman
Title:
- Signing
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
- FISEA'93: Fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art
-
More artworks from FISEA'93:
Venue(s):
Creation Year:
- 1991
Medium:
- Linotronic print
Size:
- 4 x 4 feet
Artist Statement:
The majority of the images in my work are created by the use of specially designed alphabets that are themselves pictures or patterns. The intention of the special letterforms, in most cases, is to provide greater depth of meaning to the larger image. In other cases, the letterforms create the image in a unique texture or tonal modification.
My work reflects a number of ideas I have formulated on fusing design, art and computer technology. Chief among these ideas was to merge a typographic and visual communication into one unified composition and to accomplish this with unique technical innovations I had developed. The work is both an exercise in experimental typography and computer science.
I have described my work as experimental typography. For most people, this intention is not understood at first glance because all that is seen is an image. On closer inspection of the work, it is discovered that the larger image is constructed of smaller images that are combined by the eye. The smaller images are actually characters of a font of type I have designed. In fact, the picture is a paragraph of text and the font could be changed to another with the result of totally changing or destroying the picture. In a sense, the individual pictures (letterforms) can be seen (read) and combined to form a more complete idea than if my specially designed letterforms had not been used.
Each character of the font I design still performs the role of identifying a particular letterform; the letterform, however, ultimately is used as a picture’s pixel. The first character of the font represents black, the last character is white, and in between are a range of grays.
