StereoType: New Directions in Typography

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Professor Thomas Mason’s LithoPartical Dispersions: Colloidal Alphabet Soup is currently being featured at the Boston Society of Architects’ StereoType art exhibition.

StereoType is a groundbreaking exhibition that presents works by an array of 14 established and up-and-coming designers from the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, France, the United States, Israel, The Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. By exploring the opportunities at the intersection of technology and design, this new breed of artists is expanding the boundaries of traditional typography and integrating elements from the fields of animation, craft, performance, nanoscience, and graffiti into their work. Curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2 curatorsquared, the exhibition heralds a departure from conventional typographical approaches focused on two-dimensional letters by incorporating the elements of time, movement, and the third dimension.
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LithoParticle Dispersions: Colloidal Alphabet Soup (Courtesy: Payette.com)

The Boston Globe and Boston Magazine reviews of the exhibit highlighted Prof. Mason’s work:

“Other standout pieces in the exhibit include…Thomas G. Mason’s LithoPartical Dispersions: Colloidal Alphabet Soup, which projects a live video feed of microscopic letters onto the floor. Aside from just being super-cool, someday this nano-type could be used to label cellular structures.” – Boston Magazine “One especially techy piece in the exhibition comes from…Thomas Mason, a chemist at UCLA, who’s concocted a tiny alphabet — in typesetting terms, it’s 1/300th of a point — and can only be viewed through an optical microscope. The minuscule letters are ostensibly good for labeling cells in a laboratory setting, but their vanishing size mimics the way type has receded from the corporeal world into the digital plane.” – Boston Globe

StereoType premiered at Boston Society of Architects (BSA) Space on November 13, 2014 and feature some of the boldest experiments in typography today. The exhibition then travels to venues across the United States through 2016.

List of artists and designers included in the exhibition: 

Brian Banton, Canada

Jerome Corgier, France

Design Studio Edhv, The Netherlands

Oded Ezer, Israel

Dominique Falla, Australia 

Masashi Kawamura, Japan

Ji Lee, USA

Song Hyun Ju, Germany

Thomas G. Mason, USA

Petra Mrzyk and Jean-Francois Moriceau, France

Evan Roth, France

Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh, USA.

Alida Sayer, UK

Dan Tobin Smith, UK

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UPDATE: The UCLA Newsroom has published a feature on Prof. Mason’s exhibit at BSA. To read the article, please visit here.