“(Inhale to start speech) This work observes human conversation from two directions: ‘the space between words and speech’ and ‘non-verbal sounds.’ The margin of speech is about the form in which punctuation marks remain in a conversation. When we speak, we don’t pronounce punctuation marks in sentences, like ‘How are you a question mark, ‘Well, yes I’m fine period,’ or ‘Oh my god exclamation mark exclamation mark.’ Since punctuation marks themselves are designed to express the characteristics of oral language, such as speech flow and intonation, their role is usually lost when letters become sounds.

Interestingly, these punctuation marks sometimes survive and create a space between words. For example, people who speak English as a second language often replace punctuation marks with certain words in the process of translating original sentences into English in their minds. A Japanese person Y says ‘something like that’ at the end of every sentence. For Y, this expression works like a period. The phrase ‘let’s say’ appears very often in Dutch person A’s speech. To him, it’s a comma, a habitual conjunction he uses when pausing to think about his following sentence.

Any Verbal Habit That Is Non-essential to One’s Meaning examines how punctuation fills the margins of conversation and explores the different modes of existence of the margins of speech: static, silence, air, waiting, and echo.

The work also features a painting by Joseph Severn that depicts the English romantic poet John Keats listening to a nightingale sing. It focuses on non-verbal sounds, i.e., sounds that have no meaning or have meaning removed from speech, and examines how they stimulate other senses, highlighting the presence of soundlessness in the presence of sound. I want the viewer to experience the spatiality, weight, texture, and stimulation of the sound of the mouth and the breath through the eyes of John Keats. (Exhale to end speech)”

Letters: 쏐뽙힗 is a recomposition of the artist’s 2022 work Letters, recreated in accordance with the theme of Typojanchi 2023. The work is created using the variable font Fighting, which is designed by the artist. The font is composed of three axes (thickness, width, and slope), enabling its users to set parameters between 10 and 100 pixels in thickness, 1000 and 2000 pixels in width, and -45 to 45 degrees in slope. Letters: 쏐뽙힗 is an installation that allows the audience to move the control device to adjust the three axes of the font Fighting, transforming the letters displayed on the screen into the desired shape.

The characters used by the artist in the work are syllables that don’t come easily to mind for pronunciation, taken from the list of syllables (8,392) that have been removed from the list of “Adobe-KR-9 Character Collection, Supplement 0,” which is the international standard for Hangul fonts established by Adobe in collaboration with Sandol Communication. In other words, these are the syllables missing from the 2,780 choices recommended for designing Hangul fonts out of the 11,172 syllables that can be made with Hangul alphabet combinations. As a result, unfamiliar combinations of consonants like “쏐,” “뽙,” “힗,” “깶,” “롷,” “돾,” “삌,” and “쑟” are rarely seen, let alone pronounced. The artist invites the audience to use a control device to change the thickness, width, and slope of these unfamiliar characters, experiencing synesthesia in which the nuances of sound change depending on the shape of the letters, and to imagine the sounds of characters that modern Hangul does not call out.

Fighting was first shown as part of a lettering work titled Sajangnim Fighting at Typojanchi 2015, in which Jo participated as a member of Corners. It will be released as a commercial font in late 2023.

Lecture Design takes its motif from Korean subtitle errors found in design lectures by English-speaking speakers on YouTube when translated using the automatic translation feature. Automatic translation often produces mistranslations due to word order differences between the two languages or the double entendres of words. At first glance, the mistranslated sentences seem like inspirational aphorisms or manifestos.

Lecture Design consists of a lecture video that collects and reconstructs mistranslated Korean subtitles and a book of the same name. Using the unexpected context and odd nuances created by automatic translation as a creative tool, Yang presents the designer's attitude and the world surrounding the design through a gaze open to errors. In addition, she experiments with language as a material to explore the creative environment that has changed with the advent of artificial intelligence in converting sound into text and text into sound and image, exploring its possibilities and limitations.

After New Order proposes to create alt text for all images to be published on the Typojanchi 2023 website and implement it on the website. Alt text describes an image online and is used to help visually impaired people who use screen readers understand images online. Because alt text is not visually present in user interfaces experienced by people without impairments, it is difficult to recognize its role or need, which is why it is often overlooked when developing websites.

Through the process of converting images into text and text into sound, Listening to Images reminds us of the existence of users who experience the web with senses other than sight, and asks whether today’s web is an equal space for all.

[ Research Lab ] ↗

“I like Tan Lin’s concept of ‘ambient literature,’ which treats literature almost as’ wallpaper’ and privileges the shallow read of temporary daily ephemera rather than the ‘close read’ typically emphasized, especially in academic settings. I was interested in what happened when the texts I received from contributors were arranged ‘out of order’ or presented in multiple different ways at the same time. The emphasis shifts from reading the text to gain some specific predetermined meaning to gleaning a more generalized and varied aesthetic sense of the text.”

Reading Machines, which rearranges contributed texts to create new meanings, and I Never Want to See the Same Image Twice, a series of eighteen websites that experiment with web-specific reading formats, are both web platforms that encourage “non-teleological reading.” Inspired by experimental literature* that pushes the formal boundaries of the novel, Tiger Dingsun brings the web to life and takes full advantage of the affordances of the web environment to propose an unfamiliar way of reading that is non-linear, dynamic, interactive, and impossible to achieve in print media.

Dingsun attributes the background of this work to “differences in spatial metaphors across languages. For example, the Chinese think of time as ‘up and down’ in space. The past is up and the future is down. In English, on the other hand, the past is put at the back and the future at the front. There are many ways to arrange words or concepts in space; even the most ‘natural’ spatial arrangements can be relative to culture.”

Tiger Dingsun’s web-based non-teleological reading explores the nature of reading by attending to multiplicity, contradiction, and arbitrariness. It resists typography or graphic design’s function as a tool of a regime that demands a smooth, holistic, and singular interpretation.

“An LED screen is an advertisement—a media display invented for its needs and completely subordinated to it, associated with invasive persuasion call-to-action: buy, see, call. We are doomed to advertising and are used to its forms of presentation, aggressive language, and communication speed. What if someone used this medium to share pro-social ideas?”

To put this idea into action, Ksawery Kirklewski convinced the owners of several LED billboards in the center of Gdańsk, Poland, to broadcast the non-commercial animation 17,000 times on five large screens. The same artwork was then played on displays on 170 city buses.

In this exhibition, the artist reorganizes existing works and adds new ones to present Banners on three screens. Eleven animations are shown, including a slow dilated pupil, a letter jumping across the screen, a flashing “NEED TO HAVE,” a moving hourglass, a second-hand clock, and the writing of the Latin alphabet. These animations do not contain sound, but they evoke a sense of empathy, emphasizing the artist’s intention through visual elements that stimulate the auditory imagination: segmentation, repetition, and movement.

“The profession of voice actor is often described as a job of making ‘a thousand voices.’ But in reality, there are only so many voices a single voice actor can do, and you can count them with your fingers. However, I try to capture the personality of each character in my voice by varying the breathing, speech patterns, intonation, facial expressions, mouth size, etc., according to their age, personality, physical condition, and emotions.”

100 Posters 100 Voices is a work that gives voice to 100 posters from the 24th Jeonju International Film Festival’s poster exhibition project 100 Films 100 Posters. Lee Soosung considers the work of a voice actor to be “painting a picture in the listener’s mind, lifting up a flat piece of type and making it come alive.” In this work, he uses poster design as his script. The artist intuitively grasps the film's mood from the various visual elements that the designer used in the poster, such as the typeface, photography, color, and typesetting characteristics. He reflects on this by reciting a hundred movie titles to embody the audibility of the visual image through his voice.

Tongue Gymnastics experiments with the process of transforming physical movement into art by building choreographic skills with the movement of the tongue and tongue roots, focusing on the tongue as an object that has been missing from the history and context of dance. The work in the exhibition is a video version of LEE’s performance, Tongue Gymnastics, which premiered in 2019. The structure of the work is identical to its performance version.

The video starts with the tongue moving slowly, followed by facial muscles, and then the entire body, demonstrating the mobility of the tongue as a bodily organ and suggesting that the muscles of the tongue are connected to the muscles of the entire body. In this work, the movement of the tongue, described as “gymnastics,” follows a score composed by the artist. It lists everything from nonsensical syllable combinations like “babibubbe/babibubbe” and “sasisuse/sasisuse” to foreign language pronunciations like “contunfhung” and “tequila.” However, the letters here act solely as visual symbols to direct the movement of the tongue, and their meaning is not important.

The work deconstructs the conventional symbols and interpretations attached to the tongue, presenting the tongue as a muscular sensory organ and a speech organ that produces language. As such, Lee Yunjung replaces the movement of the tongue and tongue root with a score for the body, producing individual images from the materiality of the tongue. From this, she suggests another possibility of dance using the body as a medium.

transCRIPted is an online performance where JJJJJerome Ellis plays a recording of his voice at a reading event in 2020 and types his speech sounds in real-time, including his stuttering, on a notepad application. In this work, the artist marks the discontinuity in sound that occurs when a person stutters by repeating words instead of placing ellipses or spaces, revealing its difference from silence and closely linking the visual and auditory qualities of the letters.

Ellis’s stuttering does not come in the form of repeating syllables but rather a glottal block in which the sound of the consonant “g” sticks in the throat and does not meet the vowel “a” when pronouncing “ga.” He once observed his vocal cords through a laryngoscope in an otorhinolaryngology clinic. This experience gave him a clear picture of what was going on inside him when he stuttered—when his mouth was open, but no sound was coming out.

“When I was speaking, the vocal cords would meet and vibrate. When I wasn’t speaking, they would be separated. When I would stutter, I saw them halfway in between. They were vibrating and trying [clearing] to meet, and when they met, that was when I spoke. I saw that the stutter lives in between fluent speech and not speaking at all.”*

The one word Ellis stutters the most is his own name. Stuttering is often read as silence or evasiveness by the interlocutor. If someone stutters at the beginning of a phone call, the call is cut off before the first word is spoken, and if they stutter on a video call, it seems as if the screen is frozen or there is a problem with the internet connection. If the person at the other end is a police officer, things can get serious. A black man who appears to be silent in response to a question is misinterpreted as suspicious or threatening.

But in all of those moments, JJJJJerome Ellis is talking. “Just the sound has not arrived yet”** at a timing expected by the world that speaks smoothly and fluently. The artist often compares it to a river that meanders underground and then rises to the surface, flowing unseen and uninterrupted. He embraces this unpredictable, uncontrollable, unchosen disfluency as “a form of critique and embodied critique.”*** In this context, transCRIPted is both a speech about and a resistance to the disadvantages imposed by the fluency regime on the different timing of sounds. And at the same time, it is a poetic performance that reveals moments when the linear temporal order of capitalism does not function. JJJJJerome Ellis’s speaking lives outside the conventions of time·speech·sound, between speech and silence.

Trust Fall Into the Gap is a video work by Nat Pyper, who was born and raised in the United States but is also familiar with their mother’s language, Portuguese, which they learned naturally as a child. The work is an attempt to bridge the gap between the two languages and an exercise in speaking. They use the rhythm of the alphabet’s vowels, which are not written but create auditory rhymes and sometimes semantic differences, to describe what it feels like to be unable to recall one’s native language.

“I use language as a sieve, and I push the body through it.”*

In this piece, where time is the main component, a figure experiences the sensation of forgetting the mother tongue (which their mother never formally taught them) and falling into the gap between language and body, past and future, meaning and feeling, English and Portuguese.

This video, visionreport, demonstrates sound transcription as a visual report. Hands sketch quick graphic notation alongside computer-generated patterns to link the action of listening with the act of seeing.

A handheld pen sketches lines in white across a black background, coinciding with short bursts of synthesized sound. The lines bend and waver at curves and angles, rising and falling to meet the modulating sound.

These free-hand, ambiguous shapes may resemble letters or numbers or be intuited as either the cause or effect of the sound. Each drawn figure is analyzed while in the process of being drawn. Probable future routes, indicated by fine, branching lines that proliferate where the lines end, render the set of all recognizable forms that each shape’s particular ambiguity might allow. When the pen lifts, predictions continue—lines spread, curve, and overlap, reaching to suggest a new course.

In this technique for the interplay of direct and computer-aided sensation, the distinction between translation and interpretation is made ambiguous, flickering between human and algorithmic observation. Recognizing, modeling, and predicting are viewed as musical forms.

“RASUK embOdies the essence Of spirit pOssessiOn, exerting its influence. Over the cOurse Of the past twO years, I have delved deep intO the realm Of live ZOOm desktOp perfOrmances, manipulating and cOnjuring fOrth digital vernaculars. In this prOcess, I twist and distOrt the very fabric Of standard business platfOrms/applicatiOns (GOOgle DOcs and GOOgle Spreadsheet amOng Others), unraveling the threads Of familiarity and shattering precOnceived ideOlOgies embedded within each system. What if, within these ethereal realms, religiOus ecstasy reverberates and resOnates? What if these cOrpOreal pOssessiOns transmute Our perceptiOns Of symbOlic cOnventiOns, such as the user interface? HOw can we fathOm Our true sense Of agency as we navigate these seemingly mundane machines?”

RASUK is a real-time performance transmitted three times to the exhibition space via Zoom during the exhibition period. Dubbed “Desktop Performance,” this work is based on traditional rituals from the Indonesian island of Java. During the 30-minute performance, the familiar desktop is transformed into a mesmerizing object.

Herdimas Anggara sees the digital platforms or software we use every day as controlled spaces and standardized orders. He recreates familiar digital environments such as Google, Gmail, and YouTube on his desktop and then hacks or crashes them to disrupt the digital systems we uncritically accept.

All the elements seen on the desktop screen are reconstructed during the performance into spiritual beings. Icons on the Mac desktop screen move along the background music like dancers possessed by a powerful spirit, and the digital demon lurking behind YouTube reveals its true identity and is on the loose. Folder icons blink rapidly, scanning through stored files like an x-ray; arrow icons scurry across the desktop; text is warped, and waves of spam e-mails flood the screen.

The artist visualizes these invisible technologies that take over the digital environment and invoke “digital spirits” to compel users to take certain actions, freeing computer networks from the grip of capital and the state and inspiring a shift in thinking about “active user experience.”

“This work is based on a computer language, but the creative process is more like a hand-drawn sketch or weaving a carpet. The realization of the idea involves complex manual work, and the process transforms the invisible sound into a material that can be manipulated, giving the work a personality.”

Capturing the graphic qualities of a score full of symbols and reconstructing them into a visual language has long been a fascination of Ezekiel Aquino. In Generative impromptu, Undulations in C, Op.1 No.1, the artist takes a step further from visualizing musical patterns. He creates a generator that constantly generates music as if the computer were improvising with passion, and he represents the sounds as black and white piano keys embedded in a score, inviting the audience into a flowing audiovisual terrain.

Open to uncertainty and chance, this work creates rules for the artist to compose and perform, but does not finalize them. In the musical part of the work, the “shape” of a phrase, which is the seed of music, is varied by randomly breaking it up, lengthening it, and sometimes omitting elements while continuing a slightly different melody within the key of C. The graphic, which can be thought of as a simplified musical score, creates a fluid performance based on an algorithm. This is where this work overlaps with the pioneering work of Brian Eno, who focused not on the music but on the system that generates it, or Terry Riley’s In C, which uses 53 short, ordered score modules and simple rules to allow the piece to change depending on the performer.

The work lasts 15,000 hours without repetition if the stop button is not pressed. In this case, no repetition is the same non-repeating as the flow of people and cars at an intersection. At an intersection, certain elements move according to set rules, but the landscape of the intersection is ever-changing. This work repeats its theme in the same manner, but the context, timing, and manner in which it appears differs each time. It’s uncontrollable and unpredictable. People encounter a slightly different version of the audiovisual event each time they access the site where the work is hosted.

PLAZA is composed of 14 pages from Yuichi Yokoyama’s 2019 manga of the same title. The work is inspired by the Rio Carnival in Brazil, a grand and frenzied spacetime where colorful performances on a moving stage are interwoven with the roar of excited crowds. PLAZA is the most uncompromising and noisy presentation of Yokoyama’s work, which has been dubbed “neo-manga,” with no dialog but just dense drawings depicting marches, dances, cheers, and explosions, and onomatopoeic words like “dodododo (ドドドド),” “gorogoro (ゴロゴロ),” and “paka-paka (パカパカ)” that appear in every image, creating a visual noise that reaches the viewer.

What the artist puts into his manga instead of narratives is a universality that can be interpreted in any direction and won’t become retro over time. He painstakingly removes any indication of the time period, country, season, space, race, or gender of the characters, leaving all interpretations up to the reader and focusing on the visual interest of each scene. The same goes for favoring onomatopoeia over lines that cannot be perfectly translated into a foreign language.

In Yokoyama’s manga, time flows evenly. He uses onomatopoeia to control the size and density of the cuts, making each cut contain the same amount of time—two seconds. He draws a series of landscapes, spaces, and objects, giving movement to a still image and visualizing the passage of time. PLAZA depicts approximately eighty seconds of time, while the manga of the same title, which spans 225 pages of marching and nothing happens in the end, covers twenty-four minutes of time.

Though visually connected yet with no semantic link between the cuts, Yokoyama’s work resembles a game that gets more interesting as the audience gets involved. While some people are intrigued by every cut and others quickly give up reading, the artist doesn’t provide easy entertainment, saying only that “That’s what visual art is supposed to be like.” It’s up to the viewer to make sense of it and find the fun in it

ETC × Bon Iver: Ten Years of Art and Creative Direction is a collection of art, design, images, and physical material from the last decade of Eric Timothy Carlson’s role as Art Director for the band Bon Iver.

Carlson began working with Bon Iver in 2013 upon visiting April Base, their recording studio outside of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to begin discussing artwork for their next studio album 22, a Million. Over the next three years, Bon Iver and Carlson worked closely on all aspects of the album’s visual identity. Following the album’s release in the fall of 2016, Carlson was established as Art Director.

As Art Director, Carlson has been responsible for the art and design of the two studio albums 22, a Million and i,i; their coinciding marketing campaigns; lyrics; videos; the ten-year anniversary redesigns for their previous three albums; two singles from 2020; hundreds of t-shirt designs; thousands of poster and admat designs; blogs; websites; installations; live performance video; campaigns for political activism; and more.

Though much of this body of work is publicly available, rarely is it viewed in unison. This installation gives voice to the methodical process applied in creating this dense oeuvre, highlighting unseen and original assets, and providing an opportunity to view this vast output as a singular body for the first time.

CAN TT AST EMY TH OUG HTS weaves the various components of Josse Pyl's practice into a new, site-specific presentation. By utilizing the architectural vocabulary of the building, the installation explores how language takes shape and dissolves in a circular structure similar to digestion. Walls become communicative artifacts, bearing symbols and thoughts engraved into their materiality, forming a scattered sentence of reliefs. Its message is simultaneously transcribed and distorted, similar to how the tongue and teeth sculpt our words before they push them outside the body into the world.

The building becomes a spatial poem, narrating the production of language beyond words but rather by evoking associations in the reader's mind. The installation offers a genuine stroll, reminiscent of a tourist or archaeological experience, making familiar communicational patterns visible yet estranged. Visitors move through a series of artifacts that appear as remnants of an unknown language, forming a path of resonance that conventional language struggles to articulate. While walking among the displayed ruins, the cultural codes and signals that we often take for granted are distorted, allowing us to explore different perspectives on what it means to understand and how we form our perception of the world.

Studies in Gray is an attempt to intersect the realms of print and sound using “gray” as a protocol. If typography is a holistic approach to adjusting the gray area between black (letters) and white (background), which is the effect produced by manipulating the gray area, the sound is also a phenomenon shaped by the relationship between vibrations and the space in which they occur. As such, what we perceive as sound is the constant movement of that relationship. In this case, field recording becomes a way to capture and reproduce the gray areas of sound. A possible twist on this is to assume that both the capabilities we call technology and the conscious process of perceiving something as an object involve gray areas. In this sense, Studies in Gray is an exploration of this assumption by examining various technological practices that deal with gray areas.

The results of Studies in Gray are brought to life in the exhibition as a writing and a sound installation, which are shared through reading and listening. The text centers on a discussion of the function of gray in typography and a discussion of field recording, a methodology that explores sound as an event in the gray zone, and explores the gray as motion itself. Instead of calling attention to or emphasizing a specific object, sound explores an ever-changing nature of relationships that shifts like a landscape. In other words, it listens to the landscape where elements move and transform in space, and proposes a gray epistemology with sensations and images that are produced by the landscape. Text and sound installations will be found unexpectedly in a variety of liminal spaces that include hidden spaces within the exhibition, hallways, and staircases, among others.

[ Research Lab—Studies in Gray ] ↗

Love Letters, composed of ten carpets, centers on 20th-century orthography reforms in Russia and Turkey and addresses “alphabet politics,” in which the state imposes certain letters on spoken words. It satirizes the painful experience of reading and writing one’s native language in a foreign script and the linguistic acrobatics to accommodate it.

Slavs and Tatars drew caricatures based on paintings by Russian poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky in his play Neither Healer, nor God, nor the Angels of God Are Any Help to the Peasantry (1923), which satirized aristocracy, clergy, and religion, and made them into carpets for visitors to sit on. The theme that permeates the ten carpets is the discord between letters and sounds, the tongue and the masses: the casualties of language reform and the traumas of modernization. In this exhibition, five works from the series are presented.

Shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks replaced the Arabic script used by Muslim and Turkic-speaking peoples during the Russian Empire with the Latin script, claiming that they wanted to unify the writing of the 130 languages in the federation and spread socialism. Stalin, who came to power after Lenin’s death in 1924, emphasized the united Soviet state and instituted a language reform that changed the Latin alphabet back to Cyrillic. Around 1940, all Soviet republics were forced to abandon the Latin alphabet and adopt the Cyrillic alphabet in a short period of time.

Love Letters no.1 depicts an unsuccessful attempt to assign Cyrillic letters (graphemes) to phonemes or sounds that do not exist in the Cyrillic alphabet. In Love Letters no.2, the tongue struggles in a cage, rebelling against the institutional power that attempts to fit phonemes (sounds) to graphemes (letters). Love Letters no.3 features a four-pronged tongue that acrobatically ‘juggles’ to accommodate multiple languages. پ[p] / چ[ch] / ژ[j] / گ[g] are additions to the Persian script, which is an adaptation of the Arabic script to represent Persian phonemes not found in Arabic. Love Letters no.9, which can be seated by the audience, satirizes the Soviet Union’s divisive rule in 1939, when it changed the notation of minority languages back to Cyrillic from Latin, forcing each language to write a slightly different-looking Cyrillic script, preventing minorities from communicating. The person depicted in the carpet is in distress, shouting out “[dʒ],” written in five different letters.

Meanwhile, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the Republic of Turkey in 1928, introduced Latin script to replace the Arabic script used to write Turkish in an effort to modernize the language. However, in the history of language reform in many countries, it was rare for linguists to take on this elaborate task. It was politicians, nationalists, and amateur linguists who changed the living system of language. In Love Letters no.8, a peasant woman wearing a hijab is amputated after being hit by a “Kurumumsu.” “Kurumumsu” means “institutional,” and the character is another victim of institutionalized language modernization and “reform.”

Migrating Typeface is a font created by Jo Hyejin by collecting the handwriting of migrant people living in South Korea in 2018, 2020, and 2022. The production of the work begins with the migrant participants filling out a questionnaire that asks them about their life in Korea, including the words they use most, the words they hear most, their favorite sentences, and the names of their families. The artist then selects letters from the returned questionnaires, outlines them, creates a font, and distributes it for free on the project’s website.

Created by 54 migrants from 13 countries, the Migrating Typeface consists of 620 characters, including numbers and symbols. The artist considers fonts as a hierarchical system and tries to disrupt that system by mixing the fonts of migrants among the letters written in Korean Batangche font.

“Of the 11,172 characters in Hangul, we use about 2,350 characters in our daily lives, and the ones we use a lot are compressed to about 210 characters. Migrating Font includes characters that exist outside of these 210 characters, created by the participant's native language pronunciation. This is a particular area that can't be filled with simply Hangul words that are meaningful to Koreans, and it's an area that is often left out of Hangul font development for practical reasons. This relationship structure is a metaphor for the distinction between immigrants and Koreans in everyday life.”

Installed alongside Migrating Typeface, Five Seas is a work that deals with the impression of “sea,” a recurring word in interviews with migrants living in Gangneung. In this work, the artist enlarges the word “sea” written by five people and mounds some of its outline with earth. Made of tiles, the artwork is placed on the floor of the exhibition space to create a boundary, but that boundary is not high, easily crossed, and easily broken. The letters written on the questionnaires are flat, but they are embodied in the repetitive movements of the hands and represent the experiences of each migrant. The artist creates a three-dimensional sculpture of some of these letters, inviting us to think about and imagine the specific lives of individuals that exist beyond the flat text.

The Third Thing (2023) continues, rewrites, and rewrites DICTEE (1982) by visual artist and author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). This is the result of looking at DICTEE, an experimental book that is not fixed in one identity and an open book as a process. Through the process of rewriting the existing book, The Third Thing also becomes a book that is open through a process. The process is a movement that accompanies and guarantees the inevitability of subsequent use, expanding inward and outward. “DICTEE” is the French word for “dictation.” In DICTEE, the “talking woman” hears and transcribes voices that have been lost and forgotten. The act of speaking and writing audible sounds can be repeated, nested, and spread through multiple people.

The Third Thing reflects the nine chapters of DICTEE in nine untitled acts. There are opening and closing essays at the beginning and end of the book, and they cycle through each other. Each act begins with a poem that comes from one of Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s many works of art. This is followed by a series of texts in a variety of formats, along with a few pictures.

The polyphonic, surplus voices that continue to be written, rewritten, and rewritten differently in The Third Thing are directed toward the “third kind” that exists within and outside of the time and space of DICTEE. Unfolded as “writing” as a third space that expands the third kind, which symbolizes the minority in a society, these texts are deconstructed, separated, quoted, repeated, superimposed, chained, and hybridized, and in doing so, draw incomplete, non-linear, and pluralistic trajectories. Once again, language is at the root of it all.

Murty Classical Library of India is a bilingual book series that publishes classical Indian literature with English translations. The project was commissioned by Harvard University Press and designed by Fiona Ross, Rathna Ramanathan, John Hudson, Henrik Kubel, Titus Nemeth, and Guglielmo Rossi.

This project presents the literary, historical, and religious texts of ancient India, including the Vedas, which reflect a sophisticated oral culture, in a variety of Indian languages and corresponding notational systems. Hudson and Ross did extensive archival research to ensure that the old literature was properly presented, which led to the creation of Murty Typefaces. For Indian languages, they used the Murty Typefaces: Murty Bengla, Murty Hindi, Murty Kannada, Murty Gurmukhi, Murty Sanskrit, and Murty Telugu; for Persian, they Nasim, a typeface designed by Titus Nemeth; and for English, they used Antwerp, a typeface designed by Henrik Kubel.

Rathna Ramanathan and Guglielmo Rossi designed and typeset the cover and text based on research of Indian manuscripts and early printed materials. The text design is inspired by musical polyphony, which consists of two or more voices with independent melodies, and is organized in a symmetrical structure, allowing for flexible adjustment of margins, column widths, interlinear spacing, type size, etc. according to the different characteristics of Indian and Latin scripts and writing styles such as poetry and prose. It was a process of openly acknowledging and embracing the differences between the two languages, finding synchronicity in reading, and emphasizing intertextuality.

In her Typographics 2016* online talk, Fiona Ross said, “I would like non-Latin scripts to achieve parity with Latin in terms of quality and choice—then the term ‘non-Latin’ could become completely redundant! For instance, I would like to see authentic script representation on mobile phones so communities would no longer need to transliterate into Latin script in order to send readable text messages.”

In his Cooper Union online lecture**, Rathna Ramanathan used the example of the Murty Classical Library of India to talk about what typography should consider when translating an oral culture into a written one. “Not only do the words need to be repeated exactly, but there's a particular rhythm, cadence, and sonority that needs to be replicated if the verses are to carry their spiritual charge. This is based on the belief that the sounds of words signify as much as the words themselves.”

The Murty Classical Library of India is a rare example of how diversity and accessibility can be embodied in book design, not only in terms of design research, collaboration, and craft, but also in honoring the different voices of Indian and English by developing a typeface that reflects the characteristics of different Indian scripts.

TISSUE OFFICE Inc. is a startup that creates digital services. When they develop a service, they always propose a hypothesis, run some experiments to validate it, and then either develop or discard it. In this case, experimentation is about listening to one’s audience. For example, they recruit users of the service to conduct user interviews to ask about usability, or they use “prototyping” techniques to gauge the demand of their target audience by implementing only the minimum functionality of an unreleased service.

The data from the experiment will determine whether the hypothesis is true or false. Here, data doesn’t necessarily refer to numbers, and can be categorized as quantitative or qualitative depending on its nature. Quantitative data are metrics like click-through rates, dwell time, and conversion rates. Qualitative data refers to the responses of interviewees in an interview, including spoken or written responses to questions, as well as nonverbal expressions such as laughter and silence. Neither data is an objective fact in and of itself, but is collected and judged in context.

Job interviews are one of the situations where this data setup is maximized. The interviewer sets certain criteria to find the right person, asks questions to determine how well the candidate meets the criteria, and reviews the candidate’s answers against the criteria before deciding whether to hire the person or not.

In this exhibition, TISSUE OFFICE will reenact a recruitment interview situation under the title of 2023 Tissue Office Inc. Designer Special Employment Interview. With the interviewer asking and answering questions by voice and the candidate by text, the piece is completed with audience participation, a kind of improvisational theater that unfolds according to each other’s distinct purposes and needs.

For the past several years, Chris Ro has been exploring the concept of sound in his work. But not the sound you hear or experience with your ears, nor sound visualization or the visualizing of existing sounds. More so, he has been exploring how a visual person might create sounds or sounds that can be experienced without the ears. This project is a collection and installation of these sounds. Some of them you can experience through rhythm, repetition, movement, and space. Others are singular fragments or frames from a sound.

Several of these sounds were initially exhibited at the Thieves Like Us at d/p in 2021. The concept of this piece is “hush” or silence. A series of sounds that you can experience with both your body and your eyes. Again, a series of sounds without sound.

The Score & Shapes series began with notes scribbled on a sheet of music by a hobbyist marimba player who, while practicing Abe Keiko’s Variations on Japanese Children’s Songs, made notes such as “like colors changing with each key change” and “like sounds coming from far away.” After mastering a song, Yano Keiji looks at the colorful traces left behind by the sheet music, extracts its elements and reconstructs it from the perspective of a performer, and then attempts to create a graphic score that captures the inner landscape that resonates with the music.

Yano imagines a marimba melody that the composer has stored as notes and musical symbols on the staves, and draws shapes by “inflating the image of the piece” through interventions in the gaps where the score does not indicate. He gives the song its shape, texture, color, and size by recalling his memories of the performance-where he held it in one breath, how he started and ended each note. Then, with paper and ink, he materializes the weighty, powerful sound of the marimba and the hours of accumulated practice.

“When I perform a song, I imagine a landscape that I want to show the audience. Score & Shapes: Variations on Japanese Children’s Songs, which feels halfway between abstraction and math, turns out to resemble the landscape of my hometown of Setouchi. It was interesting to see how the music and graphics subconsciously reflected the landscape of my hometown.”

Score & Shapes: Variations on Japanese Children’s Songs is primarily a visualization of musical notation, such as accents and crescendos in a musical score. The density of the ink corresponds to pitch (lighter for lower notes, darker for higher notes), the color of the ink and the shape of the figures indicate timbre and speed, and the accumulation of color conveys the tonal weight of a song with many bass notes. Score & Shapes: Rhythm Song is based on Paul Smadbeck’s famous marimba solo, Rhythm Song. The score, which maintains a steady rhythm from the beginning to the end, is often notated as “Distantly,” with the artist painstakingly rendering the notes like a pointillist painting, imagining a waveless sea with a faint glimpse of the horizon, England’s Stanage escarpment, and a train traveling across a vast expanse of land. The nature of risography printing, with its subtle misalignment of dots and difficulty in controlling color precisely, suggests the differences between composing and performing, and the similarities between human performance and analog printing.

The exhibition display also features marimba recordings of the artist’s performances of Variations on Japanese Children’s Songs and Rhythm Song as well as his independent publication series under the title Score & Shapes.

Active since 2015, seendosi is a bar, a venue, a label, and a small press. seendosiBOOK is a large “archive zine” that brings together the results of seendosi’s various activities over the past eight years. It includes posters, magazines, stickers, and other printed materials such as t-shirts, hats, bags, and other items created to promote the various events at seendosi’s space and the results of commissioned projects or seendosi’s content. They are displayed in a large scrapbook that visitors can flip through, glued together on several sheets of Lexan.

seendosi often uses screen print or risograph print to create what they need, taking an improvisational and experimental approach to their work and actively choosing their creative materials. For this reason, the production is mostly made in a labor-intensive form that involves manual labor. Through seendosi’s eight years of work across multiple visual genres, including graphic design, typography, painting, illustration, and comics, audiences can discover the dynamic currents and presence of Seoul’s and East Asia’s subcultures.

Crisp is both an installation and a reading performance that traces the modern manifestation of parchment or papyrus scrolls, the recording medium of the ancients before the advent of paper and printing, and examines the physical properties of paper and cloth, reflecting an interest in the act of investigating, collecting, and reading about the properties of paper and cloth.

Installed in the exhibition, a large scroll, which measures one meter wide and 100 meters long, is a script for a performance. The script is usually printed in a small booklet, and its lines and prints are only revealed through the performers, and do not appear on stage in their own right. However, this script has a distinct presence at the center of the performance, connecting the work to the audience. Sohn connects paper and body through the form of the script, the way it is read, and the sounds it evokes, resetting the relationship between the script and the audience.

There are three sounds featured in the performance of Crisp. One is the voice of the author reading the script. Another is the sound of the paper, created by the artist’s gesture as she moves among the papers that fill one side of the exhibition space, picking them up and reading them like a script. The last is the imaginary sound that the narrative of the script evokes. A printed script with loosely connected text and images conceals its contents in the form of a scroll, which is gradually activated by the artist’s reading.

The story engages the senses and the imagination, taking the audience through a variety of spaces and culminating in a red-carpeted performance venue. It begins with the scooping of pulp to make thin paper, the sound of seaweed harvested from the sea as it is spread out to dry, the memories of grilling nori with one's mother, the feel of grass-fed mossy clothes and bedding, and the movement of unrolling the dried fabric.

At the end of the performance, the script returns to being a work of art, and the audience that reads it changes from the artist to the audience. The story, which flows in a linear progression with the artist’s reading, becomes fragmented and reconstructed by the audience’s individual readings through the installation.

LETTERS akes the form of crosswords and rebuses, employing image representations of each illuminated letter to unveil its unique story. An illuminated letter is an elaborate capitalization at the beginning of a text, usually to emphasize the text or to beautify the print. Throughout its extensive history, the illuminated letter—a laboriously adorned capital letter within a textual segment—forges intricate, complementary, or sharply contrasting connections with the adjoining text.

While looking at the giant wall display of LETTERS, visitors can create imaginative storytelling that takes place where each letter crafts stories as it shapes words, generates sounds, and culminates in imagery within a seamless cycle. The work is seen through the lens of letters as both storytellers and cumulative agents, coalescing boundless stories within their narratives. For example:

The frog, who joyfully played the flute in the pond, got caught by a heron,
“SPRING ON IT”

Desperately trying to escape from that situation,
“AIM”

In the end, it managed to escape narrowly by putting the flute he played in the heron’s beak, creating the letter “A,”
“AVOID”

And the upside-down exclamation mark embodies the frog’s determination, which turned into the heron’s tears.
“TEAR”

The Typewriter Art series is a work that experiments with minimal typographic elements such as line spacing, line length, and flow of margins, along with the artist’s interest in typesetting work that she has been repeating over the years.

Songserm invests in creating a compelling visual impression with typography and creating a sense of immersion. Her works reveal attempts to organize vast amounts of information on a limited surface, to create order, but also to break the rules of order, hiding elements of defiance throughout the strict grid. This approach is in line with her preference for electronic and experimental pop music, where subtle notes are captured in energetic, complex rhythms that create a whole new mood. Some of the works in the Typewriter Art series are based on music, but even if they are not, they create a sense that the letters are vibrating since the repetition of different elements of typography creates a visual rhythm.

When asked about their intentions, Songserm is more likely to answer with hypothesis, experimentation, observation, or iteration than inspiration. “I spend a lot of time analyzing information and looking for things behind the words, and I’m affected by the process itself. I hypothesize, experiment, fail, and keep going until I feel the visual impression is very close to what I’m trying to convey.”

“In ‘Follow The Black Rabbit,’ Sophie is inviting us to enter a dream world. Triggered by social shakedowns of the past two years—the struggle for civil rights and racial equity, financial and social insecurities, a health pandemic, and the resulting debilitating lockdowns—Sophie inverts the Alice in Wonderland myth giving it a political twist to reflect the real world. It is celebratory and melancholy at the same time.”
—Thomas Castro

Follow The Black Rabbit is a graphic installation that fills two huge semicircular windows in the hallway on the second floor of the exhibition space. Sophie Douala says that 2020 and the years that followed, marked by the start of the long pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, were a time of learning to be stronger from sadness and anger by drawing on forgotten memories and emotions. A mantra for reflection and enlightenment, the work reflects on that time and experiments with the interplay of visual language and emotion. Follow The Black Rabbit stems from a very personal emotion that the artist defines as “a transition, an evolution, a break in time, a pause.” Yet, it blends the painful with the glamorous, the political with the beautiful, while bringing together people living through the same experiences at the same time.

It was originally presented in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, June 2022—January 2023, as part of the graphic design series Post/No/Bills, curated by Thomas Castro. The artist and curator carefully reorganized the work to fit the exhibition space, Culture Station Seoul 284, while maintaining the mood and narrative flow of the original work. The graphic patterns, which display a rhythmic and rhyming quality through repetition, cast colorful shadows across the exhibition hall depending on the light. They connect with the word “within” that appears in the video installed at the end of the corridor, proposing a reflective attitude that affirms instability instead of the dichotomy of affirmation and denial.

Figures for dashing is a book, is a voice, and is a scarf on a paradoxical—if not the most paradoxical—punctuation mark: the em dash. Moreover, it is a homage to Dadaist artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) and her manic use of em dashes. The purpose of the em (or en) dash is wide-ranging —as an appropriation of silence, as acting dissonance, as an interruption, as occupying space. In Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s poetry, the em dashes are linguistic elements that conjunct language and its acoustic interpretation. In an enlarged form and with a typesetter’s manner, Seme handed them over to Typojanchi.

In Seme’s accompanying audio piece, the dashes rise to speak. One after the other, they tell us intimately about their bibliography, their history in speech and printing, and of course, they do talk about the likes of other well-known dashers such as Heinrich (von Kleist) and Christian (Morgenstern) and Gertrude (Stein), and Laurence (Sterne) or the queen of dashing herself Emily (Dickinson).

The em dash scarf came into being with an uncharacteristic flop: Suddenly, the em dash has fallen from the page to become a wearable embodiment of Baroness Elsa’s creative spirit—its fluffy surface brought into being from paper fibers and strands of ink. Suddenly transforming into a scarf, the wearer oscillates between writing and performance.

“Shin-Yang-Jang Phonogram started from a mild curiosity: can a letter hold both words and sounds? This led to the question, ‘What would it take for a letter to have a pitch scale in addition to speech sounds?’ Ultimately, I decided to be a little reckless and combine the principles of Korean writing and the way notes are written on a stave to create a tool that catches two birds with one stone.”

Shin-Yang-Jang Phonogram is a typeface with a new concept that combines Hangeul and the scale based on specific consonants (ㅎ/ㅊ)—created by simply adding strokes to basic consonants (ㄱ/ㄴ/ㄷ/ㅅ/ㅇ)—and vowel letter ( · ) with its form derived from the sky—among three basic vowels each symbolizing the sky, earth, and human. Below are several principles that were followed while drawing its blueprint.

• This is a typeface.
• It is based on the musical stave.
• Potentially, additional strokes in the basic consonant letter are counted as one note.
• Avoid decorative presentations with unclear logic.
• Compose it as they can be played at the same time as they are typed in.

Shin Donghyeok devised the original drawings of approximately 1,500 Hangeul and Roman characters that share these principles. Based on his sketch, Yang-Jang’s Yang Heejae and Jang Sooyoung created Korean and Roman font and punctuation marks, numbers, and special symbols to accompany them. A website to play the completed Shin-Yang-Jang Phonogram, reinventing the act of typing on a computer keyboard into a musical performance, was developed by Moon Jungju. Visitors can type letters on a computer keyboard installed in the exhibition and see the letters on the screen while hearing the sound of the letters being played.

Blackboard Scribophone is a performance that employs a unique format that combines the act of writing with oral commentary expressions drawn on a blackboard. Yang Yu-Chiao weaves together four Taiwanese and four Korean folktales in an oral improvisation performance that takes the audience back to the distant past when stories began, to the time of oral literature when people told stories through speech instead of letters. In the title, the word “scribophone” is a combination of the Latin word “scribo” (writing) and the Greek word “-phone” (sound), which shows the intention of the performance.

For Yang, ancient texts, especially ideograms or hieroglyphics like bone inscriptions, are like audio tapes that store traces of past activities and stories. He uses chalk to access the encrypted and compressed content of the texts, and he talks, sings, chants, and recites as he writes slowly and repeatedly on the blackboard—bone inscriptions, Chinese characters, and Hangul words that symbolize the message of each folktale. During the performance, the chalk acts like a stylus on a phonograph that traces the grooves of a record and plays the sound.

As such, this work is an experiment in telling a narrative with sounds or letters that correspond to the surface of words instead of their meaning. The performance is done in Chinese, based on folk tales collected, categorized, collated, and translated by the artist himself. However, the artist uses bizarre vocalizations and tones to transform words so that even native Chinese audiences cannot easily grasp their meaning. Instead, he delicately conveys sounds in anticipation of the spoken word: melodies, long and short phrases, vocalizations, body movements, and improvisations. The audience understands the content from the Korean summary provided in the exhibition hall, and then infer the message from the sounds, emotions, and movements, relying on the tacit knowledge to enter various imaginative paths.

Since 2018, Yang Yu-Chiaohas presented a series of blackboard performances. The blackboard is reminiscent of an archaeological formation in that even when you erase the writing, a trace remains and new writing is written over it. It reminds us of the way human knowledge, experience, thoughts, and emotions have accumulated and changed over time.

“Oral folklore conveys the universal way humans have made sense of events or things, and folk tales from different countries share similar narratives. It’s similar to building things with blocks. If there’s a Taiwanese folk tale made of blocks A·B·C·D, here are folk tales with the B·C blocks in the Philippines or Indonesia while other countries might have stories that include B·C but unfold in different directions. Oral folklore is designed to be easy to remember, with pauses and idioms. Once the storytelling stars, the plot flows naturally like a skein of yarn being unwound.”

Lee Sooji creates the lattice structure by hand-stitching on paper, then embroidering the lettering and cotton with black thread. The series of works in the exhibition are two-dimensional outputs produced between 2016 and 2022, which are from the artist’s ongoing work, A very personal methodology of crafting the graphic. The works share the format of being exclusively handmade with type and graphics.

“Type was created for the purpose of printing and is nowadays mostly implemented by computer systems. When we write on a keyboard, we often say we are “writing” something, but technically we are not writing; we are pressing or striking. I decided to literally write the type.”

The artist built her own “writing machine” and attempted to use it to write Bodoni, a typeface with geometric shapes and mathematical proportions, precisely according to its rules of composition. However, she ultimately reaffirmed the nature of type, which, unlike writing, cannot be “written” by hand.

Once she had the format of the piece completed, the question of what to write emerged. However, the more heavy the content became, the more the viewer’s gaze was directed in some way. The original message became a “process” that was no longer in its place, disappearing behind the result. The artist explored ways of emptying the screen of content and capturing form in order to leave a trace of the process that has evaporated with time.

The works on display are the result of this practice of “treating letters as images.” By deliberately excluding meaning, Lee treats letters as images like shapes, and letters that have not yet become words as conceptualized images. The typography, graphics, and out-of-plane components, layered with repetition and variation on top of the temporality of the craft of hand-stitching, become an attempt to reveal the great difficulty of the process—the fact that the form has been there, in contrast to the meaninglessness (shallowness) of the surface of the work, which is itself what the artist is trying to convey.

Typography with Sound creates a connection between spoken word and typography, as the audience reads out the words presented by the artist, which are then translated into letters and typeset in real-time on the screen. Even if the same text is read, the sounds all have different phonetic values depending on the speaker's timbre, pitch, intensity, and timing (speed), sometimes resulting in misreading errors.

Using these various components of sound as parameters, Moon Jungju gives visual “character” to invisible sounds by creating blank space on certain screen panels or converting them into typographic elements such as the size, weight, and position of type.

The work shifts from a “spoken” reading to reading to be “seen,” materializing the temporality of speech on the screen while suggesting that the act of reading aloud relies on the interpretation and physicality of the speaker, which is a performative process that is centered around the speaker.

“It is painful to watch a movie without sound. (...) It is not so often that one has the opportunity to re-edit a completed movie and have it interpreted by a third party. I felt a bit guilty during the process and still don’t think I did a good work. With that in mind, I took the title from a quote by Japanese voice actor Yamadera Koichi about ‘dubbing’ in an interview.”

It's hard to make it better, but it's easy to mess up is a stop-motion lettering of sound elements to the silent film There Is No Poverty at the End of Labor, directed by Lee Gyuseol, which is believed to have been produced in the 1920s. Park Chulhee uses modular typography to act as a kind of “typographic interpreter,” in the same way that a film interpreter at a screening of a silent movie would bring the movie to life with dialog and gestures.

Distance of Parallels reinterprets The Street of Sun (1952), one of the few films produced during the Korean War. Theater-going was a popular entertainment when the war was at a stalemate at the 38th parallel. This implies that life goes on even during a war and that refugees who lost everything still pursue small entertainment in the new city that they found themselves in.

Taking a point of departure from above, Distance of Parallels pays attention to the lives of refugees that persist in everyday life despite the brutality of the war. Firstly, the work deconstructs the frames of the film into a 3D space, then positions the original frames at the forefront and newspaper advertisements and film posters (through which we can glimpse at the everyday lives during the war) at the back. Such overlapping is an attempt to blur the border between film and life. The second overlapping is the overlapping of clips from the film. The clips do not follow any chronological order. This overlapping is an attempt to deconstruct temporalities. Clips, rotating without any specific order, demonstrate that the past and the future both ebb and flow in our present.

The Garden of Singing and Dancing is based on Love with an Alien (1957), the first joint film between South Korea and Hong Kong. The soundtrack was lost, and only the video footage and script survived.

The name of the female lead in Love with an Alien is named Fang Yin (方音), coincidentally. The literal meaning of the name, when translated, is composed of Chinese characters that mean “corner or direction” and “sound.” As we listen to the dizzying movement of the sequence of letters on the screen in place of the missing sound, we can hear the familiar textures of sound through the gestures of the movie's protagonist.

Thanks to addresses how the visuals a designer works with relate to sound, how they replace it, and what other imaginings are possible. In this work, Gang examines how cinematic images arise from the experience of reading and re-imagining sounds from that textualized information.

GRAPHIC, an independent magazine published by Propaganda, collaborated with the Typojanchi 2023 organizing team to produce its 50th issue as a special issue on the theme of typography and sound. GRAPHIC #50 reorganizes the artists and works that influenced the curatorial team, as well as the articles and books that helped them, although they were not represented in the exhibition while organizing Typojanchi Saisai 2022-2023: Materialized Sound, Embodied Text and staging Typojanchi 2023: Open Quotation Marks, Close Quotation Marks. The magazine operates as a bibliography of Typojanchi 2023, reorganizing the content into ten texts and more than 200 pages of images, allowing readers and visitors to experience the theme of typography and sound from a different perspective than the exhibition’s catalog.