Harold Washington College Spring 2008

Published/distributed on Lulu.com.

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. The two formal parameters of every experiment were the dimensions of the page and the Helvetica Neue typeface. The first assignment took for its material the passage from Benjamin; we practiced taking it apart and putting it back together. How might we read this text and think through its metaphor, in the act of its typographic formalization?
In the second assignment, we related images to the text and put them in a sequence, to make a narrative. The third assignment introduced a second text, which each student chose individually, and put it into conversation with the first. We began to control a dialectical effect.
Phrases recur, in novel positions and emphasis, elucidated in images and typographic rearrangements: an ear that has lost the power of hearing, soldiers at the front, the enigma of China.
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.

image / text index

Only the Copied Text Thus Commands

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane.

In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front.

Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.