characters in a setting
Typography is the communicative basis for virtually all media. But there exists the possibility that there is a world of communication among typefaces themselves, each with their own personalities, families, dreams, flaws, expertise, dramas, and stories. Based on form, each typeface, letter, curve or dot is essentially an image (as it is also text), floating on the landscape of a page, yet emboldened with content. It is a form, used best to communicate something, or to tell a story. But, what of its own story? What of this landscape of a page? When free of this content, how do they interact? What actually lies beneath and within the city of a keyboard?
Typefaces become individualized characters, and narratives are created to unfold that opposite dimension: the white to the black, the black to the white, where typefaces are themselves navigating their own world outside of (or in conflict with) word or meaning, defining and determining their own lives and futures. As an ongoing serial book publication, four volumes have been made: 52 Characters in Search of a Setting, A Fable of Contents, Space, and most recently, Zombie.
Blending history, typographical terminology, science fiction, and an exploration of spaces within letters themselves, the function of line, margin, micro-, macro-, and meta-spaces, digital versus print, and so on, potential scenarios, settings and players themselves questioning of what it means to be a “character” – a character in the expanded field. A literary expansion of form and content, in experimental fiction.
