Exhibition Festival Symposium
MOTYF FESTIVAL 2016
Presence and Perspectives of Dynamic Writing
Prof. Anja Stöffler
On 24 November 2016 the international MOTYF Festival “Moving Types – Gutenberg goes Media” was opened in Mainz with guests from more than 13 countries in the Gutenberg Museum. With the expanded use of media technology and the emergence of virtual and augmented reality, a new fascination for type is emerging, the concept of which was previously largely static. The subject matter was considered from artistic, historical, scientific and technical perspectives.
MOTYF 2016 – Der Film
As a part of the festival, the media exhibition “Akademos. A Place for Poets and Philosophers”, international young artists presented their works audiovisually. On display were poetry clips, projections and interactive installations. In addition, the festival was flanked by a symposium with more than ten international speakers, workshops and artistic poetry events in cooperation with Künstlerhaus Edenkoben, the Academy of Sciences and Literature and performances by the Mainz Drama School.
Gutenberg goes Media
According to the motto “MOVING TYPES – Gutenberg goes Media” the focus was on multimedia productions of typefaces and letters in increasingly converging media. The festival promoted and enabled the international exchange of media and creative professionals, especially designers, programmers, publicists and publishing representatives from all areas of dynamic media texts, fonts and type culture.
The aim was to pursue the question of the future of type in motion on the one hand, and to sound out the interactive, networked and mobile design parameters in the field of tension between technology, design and information on the other. The possibilities of hybrid publications in type-oriented media as well as future applications in the age of the “Internet of Things” were demonstrated and discussed. Writing is and becomes increasingly omnipresent and is changing from its pure mediating function to an interpersonal actor: in surface, space, time and in self-organizing network structures.
Media art exhibition Akademos. Philosophy and Poetry in motion
Symposium
International renowned speakers from the design and media sector from Belgium, Germany, England, Finland, Holland, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland and the USA met at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz to discuss the phenomenon and the future of type in motion. For two days at the symposium “Gutenberg goes Media”, the subject matter was literally spelled out: from A for “aktueller stand (current state of affairs)” to Z for “Zukunft und Möglichkeiten (future and possibilities)”.
Media professionals such as Mike Meiré from M2 Meiré und Meiré or the New Zealand storytelling specialist Brian Lucid demonstrated which design solutions are possible virtually, digitally and installatively – and in doing so, they often presented completely new ideas and approaches for future design(s). In this way, the conference was a kind of laboratory and think tank on dynamic type, which uses new media technologies to change design and thus expand communication. Font can draw our attention in a unique way, create atmospheres and thus extend the type space we are familiar with by an experience that touches several senses.
Future Type Lab
Workshop Week
MOTYF is more than an exclusive scientific cluster, but also pursued sustainable aspects for our media and communication design students and interested participants. The workshop week “Future Type Lab” offered different workshops from calligraphy to motion graphics and virtual reality applications for more than 100 participants.
Poetry Recitals: Interface between Literature and Media Production
“MOTYF stands for interaction, avant-garde, design, culture, language and writing, dialogue and research. MOTYF is topical, but even more so, MOTYF connects the history of the written, printed and digital word with future perspectives, science and contemporary trends.
Thus State Secretary Prof. Dr. Salvatore Barbaro opened the accompanying poetry event “Anthropozän” in December 2016.
The “Anthropocene”, the humanly newly made, the influence of man on his environment, is an age. But just as man shapes the world according to his ideas, he also uses writing to give expression to his ideas. In cooperation with Künstlerhaus Edenkoben and its artistic director Hans Thill and the two scholarship holders Rike Scheffler and Manuel Niedermeier, a very special poetry evening was organised.
During a semester course, live projections from the media design course at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz were created with Lennie Faust, Katharina Jorendt, Jonathan Kaiser, Noemi Kelemen, Selin Koca, Holger Müller, Felix Schuster and Yvonne Simon. The students developed the concept for the evening in close cooperation with the authors. Together they developed a new kind of program in which the authors’ texts were accentuated and moved. This was done using animated fonts and graphics, filmic staging as well as real-time feeds via newer software applications such as V4 and resolume. Language and image thus resulted in a total work of art in real time. The project was also supported by Norbert Seemayer, Sina Meyer and Seweryn Zelazny. The artistic direction was provided by Prof. Anja Stöffler (overall direction) and Hans Thill (text). In February 2018, the film documentation with subsequent discussion will be shown at the Landeskinder event at Künstlerhaus Edenkoben.
The series of evening events was rounded off with another poetry performance in cooperation with the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. With the title “Gesänge des Funkturms” (Songs of the Radio Tower), a speech concert by the Berlin writer and poet Ulrike Almut Sandig with the poet, musician and cultural activist Grigory Semenchuk from the Ukraine, Walther Ruttman’s film classic “Berlin ¬ The Symphony of the Big City” (1927) was given its very own soundtrack. Sandy’s sprechgesang and Semenchuk’s driving basses transported the projected film into the present of a big city, which is not least of all one thing: a magnet of the human kind and its strange ability to dream of the future. The event took place on the premises of the Academy.
Medienkunstausstellung
„Akademos. A Place for Poets and Philosophers”
A core element of the festival was also the media art exhibition “Akademos. A Place for Poets and Philosophers”. Young designers from all over the world were invited to visualize and (re)stage well-known and lesser-known literature with likewise multimedia and installation formats. Akademos became the name sponsor of an idea of discourse, teaching and exchange between disciplines and people. The moving image designers became interpreters who used the authors’ texts as a starting point for their own artistic works – linear or interactive. The result is a varied, innovative and contemporary exhibition that combines state-of-the-art media technology with past and contemporary poetry and poetry. Sentence fragments, quotes from famous personalities or entire poems were taken up and shown to the visitors with creative design tools. A selection of 70 international works was chosen, which interpreted works by Plato, Hannah Arendt or Johnny Tillotson in image, writing and sound. In addition to the simple presentation on screens, interactive works of art and installations expanded and enriched the exhibition. In order to make all this plastic, the exhibition at the Gutenberg Museum was divided into eight thematic areas of formal design. These are the key to the presentation. The exhibits were ordered from simple to complex interweaving of writing and images with flowing boundaries. Visitors were able to experience virtual type space – in the VR application “Panta Rhei” – or to enjoy poetry with the interactive artwork “Poetryswing”.
The exhibition showed wonderful representations under the idea of Akademos and, according to a quotation from Hannah Arendt, offers new space for “thinking without railings”. Young up-and-coming artists showed the confrontation with the topic and it became clear how diverse and manifold such a discourse and thinking in itself can be. It was all the more gratifying that with Akademos following Plato’s example, a place could be created where an exchange between author and designer, between visitors and media workers and between animation artists could take place,
was made possible for filmmakers, speakers and composers. Numerous visitors attended the exhibition in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, which was extended until the end of March 2017 due to its great success.
In addition, the moving image works of the exhibition were shown for the first time in Warsaw in a first version in September 2016 following the curation by Prof. Ralf Dringenberg, Prof. Ewa Satalecka and Prof. Anja Stöffler. The event was part of the supporting programme of the international ATypI conference (International Typography Association). With a projection on the facade of the National Audiovisual Institute (NiNA) a successful preview of the exhibition in Warsaw was achieved. The event became an impressive experience, as the diversity of the works in their subject matter and staging became visible here as well.
MOTYF is a joint brand of Moving Types, the zzg – Zentrum Zeitbasierte Gestaltung of the two universities of Mainz (Prof. Anja Stöffler) and Schwäbisch Gmünd (Prof. Ralf Dringenberg) and the Polish cooperation partner PJATK – Polish Japanese Academy of Information Technology (Prof. Ewa Satalecka) in Warsaw. Prof. Anja Stöffler and the team of Manfred Liedtke, Esther Rosskopf and Uwe Zentgraf from the Institute for Media Design in Mainz were responsible for the organization of the festival.
MOTYF 2016 in Mainz also meant further internationalisation: additional new partners were gained in Dublin and New Zealand. German-Polish cooperation is also being further expanded.
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The German eBook on MOTYF 2016 with selected texts on the symposium, the exhibition and the events as well as additional scientific and, above all, artistic contributions is available for download at https://www.zeitbasierte-gestaltung.de/publikation/. In addition to texts and illustrations, the book contains numerous videos created especially for this publication.