Texture Beyond Type
Symposium:
Title:
- Texture Beyond Type
Organiser/Presenter(s):
Statement:
What does it mean to be a creative practitioner in the age of algorithms and surface-less media?
New media plays a crucial role in relation to the fragmentation of information so that they provide us with only some versions of the world. For instance, the way information is formatted and styled has an effect on how information is received and interpreted.We believe in this age it is necessary to re-evaluate the capabilities of human imagination, and that this can by done by exploring the relationship between executing control and being controlled by a machine.
However, creative practitioners are sense makers imagining the possible rather than being satisfied with the probable. Often they distil intentions which are not perceivable to others.In this workshop participants are invited to use a text-editor as a tool to create visual textures from typographic symbols. We will start with an initial input to then produce possible outcomes, to then collaboratively will explore its aesthetical, historical, and social values to re-work them from alternative perspectives, and produce a final outcome.
As a theoretical framework, our focus will be on creative methodologies that attempt to sabotage the functioning of tools and media or, on the contrary, collaborate with it. Here artists and designers capture, or rather provoke, improbable and unexpected results, exploring how to expand the field of the possible in contrast to that of the probable, putting in value the remains and the margin of error of the devices, as opposed to the regular and anticipated operation of those.
We will look at the thinking of the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, and other philosophers who have focused their research on questioning the role that tools and media play in the configuration of our perception and experience of the world.
The workshop will take place at EINA Bosc, a new space form EINA University School of Design and Art of Barcelona that allows the centre’s educational programme to be expanded from a perspective of permanent innovation and creative dynamics. EINA Bosc houses workshops and versatile creative spaces open to non-disciplinary experimentation, digital and traditional graphic arts, sets for audiovisual practices and spaces to carry out exhibition and performance programmes, and has all the spatial, human and logistical support necessary to develop the school’s offer at all levels of training.
