Joe Gilmore—a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer working in the fields of computer music, video and algorithmic art—is founder of Qubik, a type-focused design studio in London. As part of their Open Field residency, ROLU asked Joe Gilmore to make a risograph print to commemorate the Attention as Place contributors, available to visitors while supplies last. Read a little bit about it below:
How did you come to know ROLU?
As far as I remember I first met Matt from ROLU through my image blog Void(). ROLU’s blog is one of the blogs I check every day and I think there is a mutual admiration between us and also there’s a lot of similarity in our interests (performance and conceptual art of the 70s, design, architecture etc.). I am constantly discovering artists and their works through ROLU’s blog, it’s a constant source of inspiration for me.
Matt and I have been exchanging emails for a while (we’ve never met in person), quite a few were about synchronicity between our blogs, things we discovered and posted around the same time. And also about other connections such as people we knew or had worked with, such as Mary Manning and Tauba Auerbach.
My print for Open Field is a typographic response to ROLU’s residency.
How do you understand their relationship between their work, their blog, and their collaborators?
I think each informs the other. I think the relationship between their work, blog and collaborators encapsulates in a really thoughtful way the idea that as creatives we are part of a huge tradition which stretches not only far back in time but across spatial boundaries in the world in present time. We are not only the work we produce but the things we look at and listen to and absorb. I think their work is a celebration of that.
Tell me about the print.
The name ‘ROLU’ is set in Walt, one of the four styles of Lÿno, a new typeface by Radim Peško and Karl Nawrot. I was drawn to the playful geometric topologies suggested by the letterforms. Also, I liked the idea that one could mix-up the activities, so making as thinking; attention as place; and participation as performance could just as well be:
making place
attention performance
participation thinking
or:
thinking attention
place participation
performance making
Joseph Beuys once made the point that “thinking is form” and I think this relates to what ROLU are doing in this residency. He also could have said “form is thinking” of course.
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