Exhibition website | One letter at a time: index typewriters and the alphabetic interface

Vaibhav Singh Announcement
Announcement Type
Event
Location
United Kingdom
Subject Fields
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Business History / Studies, Communication, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

One letter at a time: index typewriters and the alphabetic interface

Now available online: https://www.contextualternate.com/#ex01
 

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Duration: 17 September–30 October 2018
Venue: Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading
Exhibition curated by Dr Vaibhav Singh, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

 

The history of writing machines is so deeply dominated by one form of interaction (the keyboard) and one interface (the QWERTY layout) that the image of a typewriter evokes an everlasting ‘standard’ apparatus – parts of which continue to be reflected widely in present-day applications. However, operative methods as well as the layouts of late-19th/early-20th century typewriters were as wide-ranging as they were fluid and irreverent. They often involved unexpected approaches not only to the mechanics but also to ways of accessing the alphabet. Drawing on a selection of non-keyboard ‘index’ typewriters, this exhibition explores how their input mechanisms and alphabetic arrangements were devised and contested continually in the process of popularising typewrites as personal machines. Encompassing early experiments as well as later variations, this display of mechanical devices and related paraphernalia explores how the letters of the alphabet have been variously comprehended, accessed, and handled, before being impressed on paper. The material on display in this exhibition demonstrates how this variety was both occasioned by and flourished through a combination of mechanical ingenuity, conceptual reformulations, and commercial adventurism. As a set of imaginative responses to ‘mechanising’ the alphabet, index typewriters raise important questions in the key encounter (no pun intended!) between writing and technology.

The exhibit is free and open to all, 9am to 5pm weekdays, between 17 September and 30 October, in the main entrance/office foyer space of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK. 

 

View archived version online: https://www.contextualternate.com/#ex01