타이포잔치 Typojanchi 2013

Supertext

2013
Website

Hong Eunjoo and Kim Hyungjae
Hong Eunjoo, b. 1985 Korea
Kim Hyungjae, b. 1979, Korea
keruluke.com

Hong Eunjoo and Kim Hyungjae graduated from the Department of Graphic Design, Kookmin University, Seoul, in 2008 and 2006 respectively. Hong worked at the Zero/One Design Center and Two Plus before starting her own practice. Kim started his career at Gantext and TPot, and currently works for Eum Books and Moonji Cultural Institute Saii while teaching at Kaywon School of Art & Design. They have worked together on a number of projects, designing graphic identities, publications and websites for clients including Hyunsil Cultural Studies, TPot, the Nam June Paik Art Center, the Hite Collection and the Seoul Museum of Art. They have co-organized the exhibitions The Next Step (TPot, Seoul, 2009), GZFM 90.0 91.3 92.5 94.2 (The Space Hamilton, Seoul, 2010) and Beautiful Books in Korea (Seoul Art Space_Seogyo, 2011 / Tokyo Art Book Fair, 2012). They also founded the magazine Gazzazapzi (2007–), and have been involved in another magazine, Domino, as part of the editorial team and the designer.

The websites designed by Hong Eunjoo and Kim Hyungjae tend to reveal the materiality of the medium. Often also developed and implemented by them, the sites would break from the Korean web design conventions established since the early 2000s, daring to start from scratch each time. They are not experts in the “web UX” or programming, so each project becomes a challenge and opportunity for new experiments and learning. By virtue of the limited self-learning, the websites they constructed with existing codes and ad hoc solutions are often a step away from smooth operation: one can almost hear the rattling sound of texts, images and codes assembling—or disjointing—themselves. Intended or not, their websites would expose their own inner workings and natures rather than sealing them behind slick surfaces.

If the websites are rather rough and crude in terms of “user experience,” their conceptual foundations are usually neat and solid. For example, the website of Typojanchi 2013 that Hong Eunjoo and Kim Hyungjae created opens up with a screen enumerating the terms for the exhibited works in a random order, attaching the prefix “Super-” to each of them. The suggested “super-terms,” from “Superghost” to “Superprocessed language,” “Supertrue story” and “Superoxymoron,” illuminate the interests of the exhibition, while playing their own wordplay.

The successive pages, in which the elements are rearranged the moment one touches upon any of them, emphasize the unstable nature of the Supertext. At the base is a “responsive web design” technique (the positions and sizes of elements are automatically adjusted to fit the changing window size), which was originally developed for optimal display of contents. Hong Eunjoo and Kim Hyungjae mis- and overuse the technique to create the nervous state of the over-optimized. The “over-responsive” Typojanchi 2013 site does not simply present the works in a neutral way: rather, it seems to suggest a certain—probably uneasy—perspective on the exhibition.