A girl with four eyes, cooking with type
Jul. 22nd, 2009 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
As a bit of a graphic designer manqué myself, I'm interested in the fuzzy area where art and graphic design merge. I was particularly excited, for instance, to attend a sort of "documents opera" at the ICA in London in late May, entitled True Mirror Microfiche. This involved the conceptual designer-slash-art team Dexter Sinister performing texts in a theatre, with the assistance of various friends, using an array of overhead projectors, drumkits and amps, laptops and pieces of paper. It seemed to me that the formal qualities of paper documents were very much to the fore in this "opera", and I enjoyed the invitation to fetishize an endangered medium.
Another project which brings out the paper fetishist in me is Yukiko Sawabe's Great Type Designers Series. I've known Yukiko for almost ten years, and happened to be collaborating with her around the time the idea to celebrate typographers occurred to her. Yukiko came to Berlin in 2005 to research the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Allerleirauh, which she planned to use in an art piece. We made several pieces of music inspired by the Grimm tale, which concerns a king who weds his own daughter.
A year or so later, I was surprised to hear from Yukiko that, with the help of her friend Mariko Takeuchi, she had transformed one of these songs -- the "King Song" -- into an ode to the typographer Claude Garamond. You can hear the second version of the song -- featured in the 2007 Kappan Saisei Ten Letterpress Printing Revive exhibition in Sangenjaya -- here.
After a run at Keibunsha Bookshop Gallery in Kyoto, Yukiko's exhibition "Typo recipe: Notes about Japanese Type Cases" is showing at Calo Bookshop Gallery in Osaka until August 8th. The exhibition resurrects the dying art of letterpress. "I will collect typo recipes from artisans and edit recipe books like a mother passing on to her daughter home cooking recipes," says Yukiko.
On a corrugated cardboard umadana (uma=horse, dana=shelf, and together they make a special shelf used for Japanese type) Yukiko is displaying colour-coded photos of Japanese type cases. The exhibition also features portraits of a letterpress artisan called Takashi Kobayashi, who runs one of the few remaining letterpress factories in Tokyo. Kobayashi made his own "type cookbook" entitled The Tale of Letterpress.
Japanese typecases are called sudare. In an ironic gesture -- for it's computer fonts and printers which are killing the letterpress printing process -- Yukiko turned two sudare cases inside out, painted them silver, and added the Apple logo to make a Sudare MacBook. "Everybody has a little umadana now," Yukiko says.
She has also created a kanji distribution map, marking 2000 out of the 9300 Chinese characters on 31 sheets, colour-coding them according to type, and providing a coloured gel viewer to see the groups with. According to an old Chinese legend, Soketsu -- the creator of the Chinese character system, and intelligent enough to grasp four classifications of kanji at a time -- had four eyes. The gel viewer therefore provides "Soketsu-scope"; normal two-eyed humans can't use the device properly. Yukiko has chosen to portray this Chinese prodigy as a four-eyed girl, and printed her face on a white dress.
I personally find the monstrous face of Soketsu-as-a-girl a little hard to look at, but then I'm a limited creature with only one working eye.
Originally published July 21st as a blog entry on the website of Japanese art magazine ART-iT.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 01:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 03:38 am (UTC)I see Casey as being a Dan/Adam combination--slightly goofy, but competent enough to stick around. I see Russell as more of a Ryan/Memphis type, stronger A-type male, who is probably too aloof and self-centered to win enough of the household over to his side by the end of the competition.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 04:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 07:41 am (UTC)It's funny, when I first saw the title here, I assumed that you meant Yukiko wore glasses. In fact, even when I read the rest of the post, I still "remembered" her wearing glasses in the photo near the top till I just scrolled up again for another look...
What does this part mean?
...intelligent enough to grasp four classifications of kanji at a time...
I can't quite grasp what those "four classifications" are...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 08:04 am (UTC)The prodigal multi-tasking eyes of Soketsu are quite similar to the multi-tasking ears of Shotoku Taishi (http://imomus.livejournal.com/132018.html), who could listen to ten different conversations at the same time and understand them all.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:35 am (UTC)Right from the beginning, this whole "click opera" thing has been like some spaghettifying yarn of yawn, but I cannot stop myself reading it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:51 am (UTC)What you're seeing there is the parapsychological activity experts call "flitter". The Twitter feed of a deceased person can sometimes continue to show reflexive or autonomic activity for some time after they die, a bit like a headless chicken or an eviscerated squid, due to a combination of electronic ectoplasm, posting templates and auto-complete scripting in the computers involved. When a feed "flitters", it flips around helplessly like a dead fish.
We can tell this isn't the real Barry, though, because the quality -- Barry's masterful presence of mind -- just isn't there. This feed is the walking dead. Take today's flitter: "Let me repeat that I've been published by Dexter Sinister." It's immediately obvious that this is material we've already seen on Twit Opera. What's more, it doesn't fit today's Click Opera entry at all -- there's no claim in the article about Yukiko to have been published by Dexter Sinister.
It's been a sad business, but I think we need to accept that -- flitter-flipping and other spookery aside -- Barry is no longer with us. The shallow hope offered by the phantasmagoric spatter that clogs the twitfeed just makes the real Barry all the more missed.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 11:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 11:32 am (UTC)See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The Book of Jokes is a Bildungsroman. The passage about Scottish masturbators is in The Book of Scotlands, which isn't by any stretch of the imagination a Bildungsroman. What seems to have happened is that Barry wrote a good line for the September release of The Book of Jokes and stored it in Twitter in template form. The feed, running adrift after his death, flittered it in advance.
You have to apply the same tests to the feed you would a Bin Laden cassette. Does it reference contemporary events accurately? And does it sound like Barry? In this case we get a no and a yes respectively, which indicates flitter.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 04:20 pm (UTC)Shokei Moji - Pictographic kanji
Shiji Moji - Indicational kanji
Kaii Moji - Semantic kanji
Keisei Moji - Phoentic kanji
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 05:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 05:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 07:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 07:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 07:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 08:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 08:51 pm (UTC)There has occurred a curious shift during my time away so that now the comments are all shite and in comparison, the actual entries seem remarkably sane and intelligent.
You are all momus' socks trying to make him look intelligent, y/y/OF COURSE.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 09:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 09:59 pm (UTC)Yes, it’s completely true! But so does every nation on Earth.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-22 10:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-23 12:37 am (UTC)the earliest chinese classification had 6 types, but only the first 4 you mention would make sense, i guess, for the supposed creator of the system. (the other 2, phonetic loans and derivative cognates, would have to come later.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-23 03:27 am (UTC)Here's a violet-breasted roller:
white man and their compulsion
Date: 2009-07-23 03:45 am (UTC)If this was a Afro-american male displaying his research in Categorizing types of early american Irish folk music... you would have never published it.
Or a white ladies proud work in exploring the variants of garden shrubs between northern and southern hemispheres... these would have proven just as interesting and socially informative... but no.
Re: white man and their compulsion
Date: 2009-07-23 08:25 am (UTC)Re: white man and their compulsion
Date: 2009-07-23 08:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-23 09:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-23 06:40 pm (UTC)Yukiko continues: "Japanese type case in letterpress can group 6.
Kanji can group 4.
Hiragana+Katakana
4+2=6
Japanese people use Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.
Kanji can group 4 frequency in use.
Most frequency type case is called "Oshucho(Pink)"
Next to "Koshucho(Blue)"
Next to " Dorobo(Yellow)"
In some case frequency typecase is called "Sode(Green)"
Sode is lucky case for artisan.
For example ,figure in chinese character,Address, date, the name of an era,
But these type cases is some two thousand Chinese characters designated for everyday use.
Other type cases is called "Gaiji".
Gaiji is so difficult Kanji.
Japanese seldom can't use it.
I illustrate type cases with a figure.
Artisan gather types in front of Umadana.
This is the most different from western letterpress."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-23 09:42 pm (UTC)Hey
Date: 2009-07-25 11:41 am (UTC)