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EVENTS

Announcements, updates, and information for conferences, exhibitions, and other events that we organize.

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2021

08
Typewriters around the world: machines, practices, cultures
22 SEP 2021  •  6:00 – 7:00 pm (UK)

ONLINE SERIES

Histories of typewriters often seem to imply a stable, universal, linguistically unspecific machine – overlooking the variations, divergences, the richness of methods and practices in a global context. In addition, texts produced on these machines have constituted minor footnotes in the history of print, design, and technological infrastructure – despite having introduced transformative negotiations between language and technology, writing and politics, labour, legibility, and the body. This conference situates typewriters, typewriting, and their myriad communities within a rarely seen diversity of languages, interactions, and interfaces. It aims to bring together scholars, researchers, designers, collectors, and enthusiasts working in this under-explored area of considerable significance, to offer a glimpse of critical enquiry related to typewriters for different writing systems, different communities of practice.   [Read more …]

 

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2021

07

CONFERENCE

This in-person event and online conference brings 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. 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. This conference is part of the exhibition programme of Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies Project, which will be presented in its entirety for the first time at Cardinal Pole Secondary School in Hackney, London.   [Read more …]

 

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2020

06
The art of typewriting: music, drawing, and writing machines
17 NOV 2020  •  British Academy, London

ONLINE EVENT

In collaboration with the British Academy, we invite you to the 2020 edition of Being Human, the UK’s national festival of the humanities. Delve into the world of typewriter artists and musicians who have harnessed typing technology in unique and creative ways. Connect with the wide range of inventive methods that artists and performers are using to redefine the spaces and roles of older technologies. Discover the typewriter’s fascinating musical connections – some of the earliest writing machines used piano keys for their ‘keyboard’, and musical analogies like ‘composing text’ are still hidden in the language we use when talking about typing today. Join us on this one-of-a-kind adventure to watch works of typewriter art take shape with artist Keira Rathbone, and listen to a musical performance like no other with the Boston Typewriter Orchestra!   [Link to registration …]

 

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2020

05

EXHIBITION

Our (now virtual) exhibit at the British Academy’s Summer Showcase 2020 explores the intersection of technology and textual communication. It focuses on the interfaces and mechanical formulations that have given visual and material form to languages around the world. Have you ever wondered why the keyboard is arranged ‘qwerty...’? Or indeed why a keyboard is associated with text-input in the first place? What did mechanical devices for different writing systems around the world look like, how did they function? We invite you to join us in exploring these and other related questions. Take a look at an eclectic set of writing machines, learn about the encounters of Asian writing systems with alphabetic frameworks and technological infrastructure. Consider old and new variants of typing, text input, and related challenges in this showcase that foregrounds the very tools that have transformed the written word over the last hundred and fifty years. [Link to Summer Showcase …]

 

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2020

04
Print unbound: the making‌/‌unmaking of newspapers and periodicals in Asia
9–10 JAN 2020  •  Royal Asiatic Society, London

CONFERENCE

Newspapers have played a key role in shaping the public sphere, contesting power, disseminating and challenging ideologies. Often driven by a peculiar mix of idealism and commercial acumen, newspapers have been documents of the most urgent concerns of the day – constituting, famously, the first draft of history. Yet the processes behind the realisation of these most ubiquitous of printed artefacts across the world have remained largely unexplored. This conference aims to bring together fresh research perspectives on newspapers and periodicals in the many languages and scripts of Asia. We are particularly interested in the history of the wide variety of processes of making/unmaking involved in journalistic domains across South/Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East. [Read more …]

 

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2019

03

CONFERENCE

Alongside the printing press, a myriad other means of production and reproduction of textual/visual matter have been a vital part of print cultures across the world. The ‘agents of change’ in the global history of printing and publishing, across the twentieth century in particular, have been other processes, other mechanisms, other devices than the printing press. This conference focuses on the role of such alternative or additional means of knowledge production and dissemination – tools like stencils, mimeographs, duplicators, photocopiers, the processes of strike-on and rub-down lettering, cyclostyle, xerography, to name just a few. We invite papers that examine the global history of small-scale technologies as well as the situational or selective deployment of alternative modes of print production across the world. [Read more …]

 

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2019

02

CONFERENCE

Histories of print in South & Southeast Asia often touch on technologies of production in broad, cursory ways that conform to predetermined ideas about their deployment, their function, and their impact. However, there are ample historical indications of local engagements that contradict the characterisation of the print revolution as a uniform global phenomenon – or indeed as a revolution at all. Have narratives of influence and impact obscured the many personal and material engagements that constitute the social history of print and technology in Asian contexts? Moving away from sweeping histories of printing and publishing, this conference aims to focus on the more intimate scale of materials, processes, practices, as well as on labourers, tinkerers, entrepreneurs and other individuals in the history of print in South and Southeast Asia. [Read more …]
 

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2018

01
One letter at a time: index typewriters and the alphabetic interface
17 SEP – 30 OCT 2018  •  University of Reading

EXHIBITION


Drawing on a selection of non-keyboard ‘index’ typewriters, this exhibition explores how input mechanisms and alphabetic arrangements were devised and contested continually in the process of popularising typewrites as personal objects. The display particularly looks at how the letters of the alphabet have been variously comprehended, accessed, and handled, before being impressed on paper. The material on display demonstrates how this multiplicity was both occasioned by and flourished through a combination of mechanical ingenuity, conceptual reformulations, and commercial adventurism. As a set of imaginative responses to ‘mechanising’ the alphabet, index typewriters raise important questions in the key encounter (no pun intended!) between writing and technology. [Read more …]