Typography as civic space
Typographic systems create spaces for participation and belonging; as
distinct from other types of experience cultivated by or through
‘design’.
Typography doesn’t just mediate between people, but creates spaces for
ideas and people to coexist (and correspond).
Typography works as a site of encounter between multiple participants,
readers, texts and contexts across time and space.
Typography is able to represent and
project (can be contained by Flusser’s conception of
typography); where typographic forms and systems function as ‘presences
in themselves’ that represent lived experience while ‘functionally being
separate from the concrete reality’. (Zuluga)
Typography creates ‘fields of possibilities’ (Zuluga) — but does this
register in our experiences of reading or consuming typographic
design?
Typographic Systems
Systems of typography are defined so as to expand from the visual and material dimensions and to encompass dimensions which are relational and operational - what people do and how they function (in the broadest sense).
An expanded definition can therefore draw upon the entire complex of practices, conventions, materials, technologies, social relationships, and institutional frameworks that organise visible language within any particular context.
So, a typographic system for administration or bureaucratic contexts would include the documentation used, their formats, the systems within which they are filed, and the institutional practices which are used to maintain them.
Typographic Marginality
Linking to ideas around cultural citizenship, that a typographic practice can become one means of practicing cultural citizenship.
Towards (New)typographical Ways of Knowing
- If Flusser’s argument that this is being diminished and marginalised is accepted.
From the conceptual margins of typographic practice. That there are non-traditional, non-Western or subcultural approaches and contexts within which typography can be said to exist (both historically and in the ever-present now). The premise may be that these sites of typographic marginality are also instances of alternative models of (cultural) citizenship. These margins become spaces to practice and assert a sense of identity and belonging. That their being ‘functionally separate from the concrete reality’ (Flusser) of what is thought to constitute the centre of things (socially and politically) allows for an imaginal function to emerge — a typographic ‘field of possibilities’ (Zuluga) that can signpost (represent and project) visions for what ‘makes the world, and thus politics, possible’ (Zuluga).
From the Centre to the Margins of Contemporary Communication
The role of ‘text’ in shaping our perceptions of the world, what Flusser terms a typographic way of knowing. What are the consequences of ‘post-typographic thinking’? Typography itself (the practices and knowledges) are moved to the margins, occupying a position of service to other forms of representation as our attentions shift towards other modes (and their combinations). The authority of text (Flusser’s claim that it ‘captures the world’ through abstraction and typification) is eroded, and the pace demanded by ‘typographic reading’ is being disturbed and displaced by the immediacy and ephemerality of much contemporary communication Typography now often exists in a temporal margin.
Immateriality, Automations
Typography as line-making
Typographic systems allow us to see typography as a
line-making practice. Firstly, this returns to the
word’s etymological root (trace) so that the line-work of typography can
be understood as traces of movement — not just an arrangement of
letters, but visible traces of linguistic and social movement(s).
These lines are connections which generate knowledge and, through
typography, bind readers, writers and ideas together with the text.