The Work of Randall Hoyt randall@randallhoyt.com 203 444 2243
IDMAA: Ideas Exhibition Catalog
I was asked by the International Digital Media and Arts Association to design the materials for their annual exhibition. I chose to reference the ‘screen’ as the unifying motif of the ‘digital’ in a series of publicity materials in relationship to increasing levels of engagement. The design of this catalog appropriates the vernacular vocabulary of the ‘digital’ through references to command line typography and CRT display technology. The anti-static sleeve is intended to be comforting to a demographic steeped in the accoutrements of technology consumption.
The exhibition featured compelling work from digital practitioners from around the world. An ‘idea’ is by definition that which ‘potentially or actually exists.’ The ideas found in the ‘iDEAs’ exhibition span the stages of completion from beta-ware to finished work, but together form a playful showcase of meaningful investigations in the arts, design, and education.
The white boxes surrounding each line of text suggest the ragged rectilinearity of the ubiquitous selection highlight and serve the critical function of carving out space for the language to be read.
The order of the artists represented in this catalog corresponds directly to their submission time-stamp assigned by the online submissions server. This information recorded in the server database has been elevated to a formative role in the creation of this catalog, much in the same way that relatively insignificant details assume positions of great potency upon reflection within our fickle and subjective memory systems.
The information included about each artist is: submission time, name, title, medium, date, image name and statement. The image name is a randomly generated 32 character code followed by the original name of the image. This seemingly insignificant detail of the submission process found an appropriate place in a design mediated by machine processes.
The vertical catalog layout effectively evokes the ‘endless scroll’ of computers. The large images painted across each page were photographed on a CRT screen and the default mono-spaced typeface Monaco consciously denies it own specificity.
