Amandine Alessandra: News & Projects / Portfolio

Typographic performance at Liverpool Street Station (18:00:00 – 19:00:00)

For Clerkenwell Design Week 2011 DesignMarketo is setting up at the Farmiloe Building on St John Street in collaboration with the Barbican Art Centre. I will be giving a (free) workshop based on stop motion and typography, using the iconic building space as a grid to produce a human typeface.
Wednesday 25.05.11 from 2-4pm

Also: do not miss Alexandre Bettler‘s workshop on mobile typography:
Thursday 26.05.11 from 5-pm

24-26 May 2011
34, St John Street, London
EC1M 4AY

http://designmarketo.com/events/clerkenwell-design-week-2011/

“All is flux, nothing stays still, no man ever steps twice in the same river“, observed Heraclites.
This intelligent (because human) letterform allows a message to change from an instant to another, in an attempt to reflect on the fleeting quality of the moment.
It is flexible enough to keep the message relevant and up to date as its context changes, but also has the visual presence of a giant billboard.

An everlasting choreography referencing the (real) passing of time, people standing as the Hours moving only once every 60 minutes, while the one acting as the tenths of Seconds executes a very fast routine in a continual move.
This image is a screenshot of this work.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau creates a relationship between the metropolis and its inhabitants on one side, and the practice of writing and speaking on the other side, and how they are “writing an urban text
as they move through it”.

A given message evolves in perpetual flux and its context is permanently shifting, regardless if its support is an advert or public signage.

Who is its audience? Where is it read? What is the weather like? What is everyone talking about on that day?
Are they in a hurry? Does it smell of hotdogs as they’re reading it?
A static printed message cannot adapt to a changing situation; it therefore belongs to the platonic ideal world rather than the hic et nunc (here and now) of the real world.

This is an experiment on wearable lettering.
It started as a series of three day-glow and black tee-shirts, each with a slightly different pattern that becomes different highly visible letters when seen from a distance, providing that the wearer places his arms and body in a specific way.

When wearing these tee shirts, a group of people can form a word, a sentence or a statement. Because a single person can mimic a whole set of letters, the message can change, from one movement to another.

The flexibility of this letterform being slightly jeopardized by the fact that one single tee shirt couldn’t be used to make every letter, I started to think the wearable typography as a bolero instead: a pair of day-glow sleeves attached together by a strip of fabric that could be worn across the front or the back of the wearer.

This new pattern allowed the wearer to become any letter, number or punctuation mark in a small move.

Fitzrovia becoming Noho Square.

Fitzrovia then, now and to be.

This research aims at questionning/pointing out temporary hidden empty spaces,
caught in between what’s gone and what is to come.
This series of installation takes place in building sites in the changing urban landscape.
High wooden fences are hiding buildings being demolished or raised, leaving us with the feeling that a tower can appear or disappear in a night, as the whole process is hidden from us, while the result appears effortless in its (fake) instantaneity.
Tested visual solution: temporary hi-vi typographic installations

mapplethorpe ll

This is a second version of the Mapplethorpe alphabet, using the American photographer’s world as a mood board.
This is part of my research on how to get a letter to mean more than it reads.

A few more letters here.

http://designmarketo.com/booksetting-poster/

A book that is shut is just a block is now available for sale as an A1 poster on DesignMarketo!

Same as before but thought of as an installation/live type.

Or how a hose, a dog, a toboggan and a concrete block put together can mean Love.