Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater Had a Wife But Couldn't Feed Her: Paper for Tyler

There are a relatively small number of people working in the field that I have settled on, which is behavioral typography, and the person that I wanted to write about is French, and there was very little information on him, and the information that i did find was all written in French, surprisingly. Don’t those bastards know that we speak American English? So I picked Peter Cho instead. His first website that I found wasn’t so interesting, but I then found another site that had more of his college work on it and one of his typographic experiments using circles and limited interactivity was more intriguing to me. Here it is if your interested.

Peter Cho was valedictorian of Santa Rosa High School in California, went on to further his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, Design, and Computation, with minors in architecture and music. Then he continued and got his master of science degree in the media arts and sciences. His humor is really dry and nerdy. He is a korean american and only kinda speaks Korean. So that is the low down on who he is, and from the sounds of his resume he is crazy into programming and technology of all kinds, and has a bunch of arthritic little fingers in all manner of screen based pies.

I was able to find the abstract for his thesis work at MIT, and it is as follows:

“This thesis research explores the prospect of typographic forms, based on custom computational models, which can be faithfully realized only in a three-dimensional, interactive environment. These new models allow for manipulation of letterform attributes including visual display, scale, two-dimensional structure and three-dimensional sculptural form. In this research, each computational model must accommodate the variation in letter shapes, while trying to balance functional flexibility with the beauty and legibility of fine typography. In most cases, this thesis work approaches typography at the level of a single letter, looking at ways we can build living, expressive textual environments on the computer display.”

So basically what he is saying is that he wants to create 3D interactive environments that allow the user to manipulate the structure of the letter on the micro level of the single letterform. Why? Well, I asked myself that same question, and apparently so did Peter (yeah, we are on a first name basis with each other and golf on Sundays). He believes that print design is where it is today because it has a deep and rich vernacular tradition of the visual arts on which it relies. He feels that media design lacks this tradition, and thus has to draw from other media to compensate. His work is an attempt at exploring the crossroads of these things in search of a meeting place.

I find this assertion strange and intriguing. If you will allow me, I’d like to think on that for the next couple lines that follow. So if we consider the history of visual art as cursory as my knowledge is we can say that the first bits of “art” were things that we all learned about in Art I & II like the Woman of Willendorf and the Lascaux Caves, crude tech, crude drawings. Fast forward, and we have more advanced materials pigments are being made there are plaster paintings oils, tempra, more advanced carving tools, etc. fast-forward again and people figure out how to reproduce images, with things like block printing, lithographs, etchings, and all the other various printing methods that have been created. Then movable type, then the cameras. All the while as tech was advancing so were things relating to optics and the studies of perspective. So maybe some of this is a little out of order, but it basically works to illustrate my point. So all these things were created to make this easier typically but were not necessarily synonymous with art, as the people of the time considered it. Only in the future have we given that austere label to the visual detritus of the past. (and I mean that in the nicest way) So, maybe that is what is happening, yeah the computer does other things and wasn’t made to make art, but we do make art with it. So I think to say that the computers relation to the traditions of visual art is any different than block printing’s, sounds strange to me. I would agree that, of all the innovations through time that computers mark the largest jump from one media to the other. So maybe their is something there.

The he had a quote from April Greiman which I found intriguing because it relates directly to my approach to this project is,

“What I really miss now, are the great accidents that happened when I first started working on the Macintosh four years ago...I’d use the wrong keyboard command or the mouse would get stuck, and these things would start happening, opening a whole new road of possibilities that hadn’t been heavily trod upon by other designers.”

I’m just fiddling about and changing things and just sort of seeing what will happen. I’m hoping that the small changes have big results. Whooo!, or as a whale would say, “Vouwump, Vouwump. OOOOORRRYYYEEEEEE.”