Dear Typojanchi newsletter subscribers,
At the end of summer, we deliver the first newsletter for Typojanchi 2023: International Typography Biennale (“Typojanchi”). The Organizing Committee of the International Typography Biennale has named graphic designer Park Yeounjoo as art director of the eighth Typojanchi under the new theme “Typography and Sound.” This begins a journey to Typojanchi, which is scheduled for fall next year in Seoul.
The first event for Typojanchi is the pre-biennale Typojanchi Saisai 2022–2023 (“Saisai”). Saisai is presented at Culture Station Seoul 284 RTO from September 2 to 4, 2022. With lectures, a workshop, and a unique program titled “Punctuation Medley,” the event explores the theme of Typojanchi 2023 from several angles.
This issue of our newsletter covers the programs and how to participate in the forthcoming Saisai, as well as a rough sketch of the following year’s Typojanchi based on an interview with the art director. Please keep following our journey to the eighth Typojanchi!
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Typojanchi Saisai 2022–2023:
Materialized Sound, Embodied Text
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Friday, September 2, at 7:00–8:30 p.m.
Culture Station Seoul 284 RTO |
Speaker. Alex Balgiu (Educator / Designerwriter)
Moderator. Shin Haeok (Curator of Typojanchi 2023) |
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“음n음o음d음e음s음” highlights points of text-sound intersection in poetry, drawing broad connections between sound, poetry, and graphic design.
This lecture, which pairs with the workshop “시s시o시u시n시d시i시n시g시” exploring the typographical energy of sound poetry, also perfectly resonates with the lecture “The Unplayable Score, Music for the Eyes,” which examines the relationship between text and sound in music.
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Saturday, September 3, at 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Culture Station Seoul 284 RTO |
Instructor. Alex Balgiu (Educator / Designerwriter)
Moderator. Shin Haeok (Curator of Typojanchi 2023) |
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This fantastic workshop, in which participants learn about and compose their own sound poetry, offers an experience of typography’s open energy. In the workshop on a Saturday morning, participants will walk around Culture Station Seoul 284, collecting sound and text sources from the urban environment, then sensibly reconstruct the collected sources into “typochants” using equipment such as typewriter, copier, and scissors.
Participants should bring:
An audio/video-recording device, such as a smartphone or a tablet, and comfortable shoes
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The Unplayable Score, Music for the Eye
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Saturday, September 3, at 4:00–5:30 p.m.
Culture Station Seoul 284 RTO |
Speaker. Shin Yeasul (Music critic)
Panel. Shin Donghyeok (Graphic designer)
Moderator. Yeo Hyejin (Curator of Typojanchi 2023) |
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A musical score is often filled with symbols that dictate the sounds, but some scores deviate from this convention to pave their own paths. Instead of reading symbols and making sounds, these scores demand visual observation and imagination.
This lecture introduces the evolution of textual scores in the context of the long history of Western music and how the practice of notation changed during the 20th century, paying particular attention to the graphics-mediated notational experiments that largely emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. A graphic designer joins the post-lecture conversation to share various examples of cases in which typography and music intersect.
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Sunday, September 4, at 4:00–5:30 p.m.
Culture Station Seoul 284 RTO |
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4:00 p.m.
The Punctuating Work: Laughing and Crying over a Single Dot
Kim Minjeong (Poet / Editor) |
By showing diverse examples of genres of books, the speaker provides an opportunity to follow the changeable process of modifying punctuation to see how the speaker has added and removed punctuation as a poet and editor and what difference such acts have made. This induces the audience to reflect on the punctuation marks they recognize and use in their own ways.
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4:15 p.m.
How to Dodge Punctuative Traps While Speaking
Lee Soosung (Aspiring voice actor / Former artist) |
Voice actors reproduce scripts through speech by reading not only lines but also elements like the amount, pace, and temperature of breath. A scriptwriter doesn’t usually voice their own script; thus, a script, like a musical score, can put on a hundred different voices depending on the actor. Can the words in a script be reproduced exactly as imagined by its scriptwriter? What roles do punctuation marks play in reproducing text in the form of speech?
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4:30 p.m.
The Power of Punctuation: On Words Omitted by Ellipses
Shin In-ah (Graphic designer) |
Film director Raoul Peck said, “Any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences” in his documentary miniseries “Exterminate All the Brutes (2021).” How can people hear a voice that is silenced, inaudible, or decidedly unheard? To do so requires an entirely different hearing method, language, and understanding of the world.
Through several examples of cases in the history of graphic design in which silence was broken down, the speaker asks whether we are truly ready to face the unheard voices and what they have to say.
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4:45 p.m.
Quite Serious about Punctuation
Chae Heejoon (Type designer) |
In digital typesetting, punctuation marks are often used as an active element of typography. The presenter talks about what visual discussions are generated by punctuation marks in the borderland between type designers and users, along with the typographical roles of punctuation marks, something designers consider when dealing with text.
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5:00 p.m.
Commas, Dashes, and Slashes on the Backside of a Lyric Sheet
Lee Lang (Artist) |
Question: How can prose become lyrics?
Answer:
- Recite a prose piece to the rhythm of a song.
- While repeating 1, find and mark breathing points between letters.
- Change words or adjust word count based on the breathing points.
- Erase the marks on the prose piece and type the remaining letters anew.
- Complete the lyrics.
By looking at singer-songwriter Lee Lang’s process of writing the lyrics for “Everyone in the World Began to Hate Me” through audiovisual materials, the audience can verify whether the song was written through such a process.
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5:15 p.m.
Quietly but Clearly
Seo Kyungsoo (Musician) |
A drum is the most primitive musical instrument in that it is beaten to make sounds. In a band, a drum is often considered an assistant to melodic instruments, but if a drummer cannot dominate the rhythm and keep time, the band loses balance. In this regard, a drum is similar to punctuation, which provides context between words and controls narratives. Rather than language, which is sometimes ambiguous and imprecise, the finale of Punctuation Medley describes the venue's atmosphere through a jazz drum solo—a kind of music considered too precise to be a language.*
*
Hua Yu, Melody of Literature, Description of Music, Korean edition, trans. Mun Hyeonseon (Prunsoop, 2019), 371.
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Punctuation Medley invites the design studio 1-2-3-4-5 as a “punctuation interpreter” to graphically display the punctuations detected in the speakers’ voices or the musical performance on a screen in real-time.
1-2-3-4-5 developed several sets of punctuation graphics that “do not feature the actual punctuation marks themselves” to accompany each of the presentations. Inside the event venue, they visualize the non-phonetic punctuations using these graphics, inferring the punctuations based on the intervals, emphases, and rhythm of the speakers’ voices or musical performance to insert graphics in between the flow.
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The following is an interview with
art director Park Yeounjoo about Typojanchi 2023.
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The theme of next year’s Typojanchi is “Typography and Sound.” What are your approaches to this theme?
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I’m developing several ideas in the cycle of sound and text: sound turns into letters, or letters turn into sound. Numerous questions seem to arise in the process where sound is visualized or materialized through dictation, typing, printing, and coding, and where letters turn into sound through acts including playback, recitation, and performance. In particular are the questions of how literature, music, and art visualize sound on a page; how time, space, and bodies are treated when sound is created from letters or symbols; and what is generated or removed in the process of translating sound into letters or letters into sound—the collapses, gaps, and intersection between all such elements are within the realm of possibility. More directly, attempts to connect fonts with sound can be considered. Centered on works in which such things intersect and connect with each other, this exhibition presents typography as the art of intermediacy. |
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The title Saisai “Materialized Sound, Embodied Text” seems to be an extension of this idea. |
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“Materialized Sound, Embodied Text” is not only the title of the forthcoming Saisai but also the concept of next year’s main event, Typojanchi. I want Saisai programs to provide an opportunity to think about and get used to “Typography and Sound” prior to the main event, both for the biennale's working group and for viewers. For this reason, the programs are organized to help participants study the history, background, context, and possibilities of the theme based on works of literature, music, and visual art and to share the thoughts of creators. This provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between sound and text from several angles. |
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What programs are available at Saisai? |
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There are lectures, a workshop, and a performance titled Punctuation Medley for three days of the event. A speaker who has worked on research and archiving at the crossroads of literature, publishing, and graphic design has been invited to give the first lecture, which will explore the potential of typography and sound by crossing the boundaries between concrete poetry, sound poetry, and visual poetry, and even dealing with works by experimental and pioneering artists.
The second lecture is a conversation with a music critic about the point where music and typography meet and the visualization of sound through graphic notation under the theme “Music to See or Music to Read.”
Punctuation Medley, slated for the last day, is more like a performance than a talk, despite six speakers being invited to the program. The six include a designer, editor, aspiring voice actor, and musicians who share their experiences with and thoughts on dealing with “punctuation” in their areas, each for about ten minutes. A unique theme is punctuation, in that it infuses works of literature or music with time and sound through soundless symbols.
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What are your goals as art director of Typojanchi? |
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Some words like “inspirational,” “boundary-connecting,” “provoking questions and thought,” and “non-excessive” pop up in my mind. Inspiration is like a small crack in thought, and connecting boundaries is related to attempts to combine areas through design or the discovery of creators who have made such attempts. A work that provokes questions and thought is what all creators ultimately aspire to, and the concept of “non-excessive” is applied to the entire process of Typojanchi from beginning to end, including exhibition composition, participant selection, scenography, organization of exhibition-related programs, and even waste disposal after the event ends. |
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