Presen­tation & Workshop:
THE ALPHABET OF NOW

SALT Galata, Workshop II-III

Creating new letters all over again

Ancient alphabets often began by drawing pictures to represent the world — Eye, Hands, Wave, Bowl. These pictograms became the source material for modern letterforms, as the image was abstracted over generations into simple geometry: yesterday’s Ox becomes today’s letter A.

What if we started over today with a new visual language, as our ancestors did? What would the important concepts of our modern world be? And what would this new visual language look like as it became abstracted and simplified over time?

Artist/designer John Pobojewski of the Chicago studio Thirst invites participants to this collaborative workshop to imagine a new alphabet of concepts universal to the modern urban life that transcend language barriers. Each concept will be visualized using modern technology, including cell phone camera and Kinect motion capture. At workshop’s conclusion, software written by the artist will abstract each image in “fast forward,” turning an image into a letterform for our modern age. The artist will use these forms and the concepts discussed as subject matter for a short self-published folio. All participants will be credited with their work.

The artist will open the workshop with a short presentation of Thirst’s art of letterform in communication — thoughtful, expressive, dynamic, and brave.

John Pobojewski is an American intermedia artist/designer focusing on blending the worlds of movement, print, sound, video, and generative art, and is a principal at the studio Thirst/3st in Chicago. Thirst’s founder Rick Valicenti and the work of the studio were recently awarded the National Design Award for Communication Design by the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum in 2011, an honor bestowed by the White House. Selections of Pobojewski’s work at Thirst are included in the Chicago Design Archive, the Denver Art Museum and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum. He has presented at TEDx, the SEEK Conference, and Mobile Processing Conference, and has lectured at several universities throughout the United States.

Both the presentation and workshop will be held in English.