TYPEFACE showing on Sky Arts, next showing Monday 19th March 8.50am
Back to the future
In the era of iPhones, iPads and quite-literally iEverything, a Wood Type Museum might seem rather outdated, to say the least. But could it be that something so traditional, primitive even, can inspire today’s avant-garde digital artists?
Filmmaker Justine Nagan’s insightful documentary visits the Hamilton Wood Type Museum and Print Shop in Wisconsin to explore.
Once a bustling hive for artists and designers, the museum now sadly resembles a time capsule of what used to be the glory days of manual printing; in other words, the days of freshly-scented books, hand-crafted gifts and minimal consumerism habits. Housing 1.5 million pieces of wood type, the museum is no-doubt still very rich in resources, but it is nevertheless struggling to remain afloat as the new generation of digital obsession fails to look back on these basic but essential days.
In the documentary Typeface, international artists meet the workshop’s retired craftsmen, who have lived through the evolution of the printing industry and are among some of the last practitioners of the art of wood-type printing. Together, they attempt to comprehend the convergence of modern design and the traditional technique and find the answer to the question “could the future of the printing industry possibly lie in the past?”
We take a fascinating, in-depth look at the effect of computers and the demand on traditional manual techniques.
