Interpolate

Abstract

"Interpolate" is a provocation, a project, and a proposition. To Interpolate means to insert something into something else. It also implies corruption, as it alters that something. Interpolation as a method of interrogation sets up a new dynamic, introduces an irritant, and asks probing (sometimes unsettling) questions; unpacking the assumptions which underpin our practices and posing meta questions about technology, human agency and language in its broadest sense.

In the first workshop of this newly-formed teaching and research project, students/staff and alumni of the Graphic Design course at Camberwell convened over 2 days, learning to count in binary; undertaking a letterpress 'reading group' and taking material language/ typography; whether digital/analogue, or somewhere in-between, as the context for act/s of Interpolation. Through intensive dialogue and making, we sought what opens up in the altered and corrupted spaces between language, typography, codes, systems, and beyond.

By explicitly introducing complexity, depth and nuance into the various questions which circulate around, beyond and within typography (and/as language), we expanded our understanding of typography as a 'known' practice. Intense material investigations sat alongside theoretical ones, without privileging either. These hands-on, intensive, and technologically self-reflective methods permitted an interrogation of what typography is, was, and might become.

This participatory workshop will include staff, students and alumni of the Graphic Design programme at Camberwell. We will introduce some of the methods and questions which ‘Interpolate’ engages with, and discuss possible future research avenues. David Bohm’s process of ‘free dialogue’ in producing deeper understanding, will be our guide.