Artists' book.
In an attempt to celebrate how we find ourselves doodling while on the phone, testing pens in stationery shops, our belief in folklore, the need to misuse technology or whose idea it was to fly aero planes in formation to write messages across our skies.
The research notes selected from the archive A Recent History of Writing & Drawing hopefully provide references to things old, new and maybe forgotten which together can offer an alternative understanding of our habit to document thoughts and ideas. Upending assumptions that any one kind of communication is more authentic, more direct or more valid that any other, A Recent History of Writing & Drawing finds meaning, texture and poetry in the most unlikely places.
Jürg Lehni (born 1978 in Lucerne, lives and works in London)
is an independent
designer, developer and artist. His self-initiated work originates from reflections about tools, the computer and the way we work with and adapt to technology.
Over the past years he worked on a family of projects that are all linked through these topics. Most of these projects were collaborations with people from other backgrounds (Graphic designers, artists, typgoraphers and engineers).
Alex Rich (born 1977 in Caerphilly, lives and works in London) approaches
design from a multi-disciplinary perspective. As a member of the jury that judged
Jürg Lehni's
ECAL degree show in 2002, and seeing one of Lehni's drawing machines at work, Rich—a deft observer of accidental meaning—opened a discussion with the designer about the machine's historical and cultural context. Alex Rich viewed the work as, “the translation of imagery from mind to machine to wall," and suggested assembling, for an exhibition, compilations with similar writing and drawing machines.
