This in-person event and online conference has been organised in collaboration with the Frequencies Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded by artist Oscar Murillo and led by political scientist Clara Dublanc. From 24 July to 30 August 2021, over 40,000 canvases by more than 100,000 school children across the world will be brought together by Turner Prize-winning artist Oscar Murillo in a major installation marking the culmination of his eight-year project ‘Frequencies’. The project will be presented in its entirety for the first time by Artangel at Cardinal Pole Secondary School in Hackney, London.
Call for presentations: We invite abstracts/pre-recorded video submissions for this online conference that will bring together a wide-ranging group of researchers and practitioners to examine the mutual dependencies, and the crossflow of influences, between handwriting, hand-drawn characters, and typographic printed/digital letterforms. We invite explorations of the interflows between handwriting, lettering, typographic characters, and broadly letterforms in all their variety, to examine how their overlaps have been manifested over different sites of graphic expression across history, and how they continue to shape current practice. Spanning a range of topics – from the paradoxical construct of ‘handwriting fonts’ to the absorption and reimagining of typographic forms in handwriting; from the development of formal models of letterforms to the strong associations between certain styles of letters and their perceived meaning – the conference aims to address the rich media archeology and graphic apparatus of text: within, across, and in-between different contexts of use.
The conference is particularly keen to address the sites of boundary-crossing between conventions, media, and practices (e.g. between handwriting and its pedagogy, calligraphy, lettering, type design and typography, graffiti, sign-painting, stone carving etc), as well as the crossflow of formal ideas and stylistic influences in different/unrelated contexts.
We invite international participation in this online conference from designers, researchers, and practitioners with an interest in visual characteristics, stylistic connotations, and material production of letterforms. Contributions can be in the form of video presentations of 15-20 minutes, with a minimum of 10 slides of visual referenced material, or an abstract (250 words) and bio (150 words) can be sent for review. Please note that in order to engage a wider audience, the presentations will be recorded and may be screened for visitors at the exhibition in London as well as hosted online.
All video submissions and abstracts should be complete as intended for presentation and must be received before 5 August 2021. If your video/abstract is selected, you will be informed before 10 August and must be able to participate in the online conference on 20 August (live Q&A session will follow the screening of pre-recorded video presentations).
Please send your abstracts via email, and video submissions via WeTransfer or another large file transfer service to conference@contextual-alternate.com
In-person event: 19 August 2021 • 2:00–5:00 pm (UK) Register to attend the in-person event: (Tickets limited to 75)
Online conference: 20 August 2021 Register to attend the online event: (Tickets limited to 100)
Conference organiser: Vaibhav Singh conference@contextual-alternate.com; https://www.contextualternate.com/event03