Graphic Design Exercises

We conducted, over the course of a semester, a series of intensive typographic experiments upon a text of Walter Benjamin’s, Chinese Curios from his essay One Way Street. Benjamin’s text proposes a metaphor: if reading is accomplished by virtue of a distance, as if from the height and insularity of an airplane, what would it mean—what would it look like—if a text was read from the ground? We tested the gravity of this provocation and considered its implications for the notion of legibility. Clarity and chaos materialize in these experiments. The work, in its all its daring and resourcefullness, sketches a startling landscape —a multiplicity of answers to Benjamin’s almost unthinkable but not unseeable provocation to the reader/transcriber, i.e. the graphic designer.