Any critical historical prototyping practice necessarily involves drawing on new and old technologies of fabrication while negotiating the irreducible gap of historical time.
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Combining elements of contemporaneous typefaces derived from Bauhaus principles of simplicity and the liberatory Futurist typographic fantasy of pure graphemes – free of history – these recombinant three-dimensional letters realize Loy’s unpublished modernist poem an articulation of language as a physical substance which infers its own morphology.Ĭritical making brings a crucial dimension of haptics and embodiment to theories of form, function, and poetic invention.
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Alphabetic segments extend into the x, y, and z coordinates in exponential iterations and conjoin according to polarities established with magnets. Although it is intended as a toy for young children, “The Alphabet that Builds Itself,” is also a work of object typography which articulates a theory of language as kinetic, geometric, recombinant, and open to mutation. This essay discusses the interpretive and methodological implications of using 3D printing technologies to prototype the archival diagrams of a proposed but never constructed plastic segmental alphabet letter kit – a game designed by Mina Loy for F.A.O. This entails approaching material forms of knowledge as sites within which epistemological and ontological problems may be evaluated as physical embodied practices. An important branch of digital humanities involves prototyping the past.