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Title: Free Operations Date: 2007-11-02 11:56 Author: Femke Category: Type Tags: Print Party, Workshops + teaching Slug: free-operations Status: published **2 day workshop** Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem (20 + 21 November, 2007) What permutations between typeface, typesetting and text can you imagine? How to design through scripting and can you read differently with computer manipulations? Full brief: <!--more--> > Design could not exist without a larger eco system of cultural works > around it. Even the most commercial of design practices are nourished > by historical or contemporary artworks, films, photographs, lay-outs, > images, ideas produced by others; at the same time, design feeds into > culture. > > For culture to grow, it seems counter productive to fix it in place > with restrictive copyright licenses that prevent good ideas from what > they do best: to spread. Open content licenses such as the Free Art > License, Creative Commons, General Public License were invented to > subvert intellectual property laws in order to keep culture in > circulation. They are an unfortunately necessary asset when 'public > domain' has become the exception to the rule. > > OSP (Open Source Publishing) is a small design research team from > Brussels, involved in various aspects of the publishing cycle. From > typography to editorial work, OSP tests out in practice how graphic > design could work differently, using Free Software and copyleft > licenses. We try to think out loud about what other tools are possible > and what is possible with other tools; to demonstrate to ourselves and > our colleagues the potentialities and limitations of Free Software, > how they can be tools to think with and how they can be put to work in > professional design environments. > > For the \*Free Operations\* workshop, we will work exclusively with > content that is in the public domain, with fonts that expressly allow > for modifications and redistribution, and we will process those > materials using open source tools. > > Point of departure is Project Gutenberg, the first and largest single > collection of free electronic books. Including Max Havelaar, Flatland > and Dracula, the project brings together many classic texts. Once > retyped and corrected, they are than re-entered in to the public > domain as digital files. Besides an immense and valuable library of > literary works, The Gutenberg project makes a searchable database > available of text files, paragraphs, words and letter combinations. > > What permutations between typeface, typesetting and text can you > imagine? How to design through scripting and can you read differently > with computer manipulations? > > \*Free operations\* starts with an installparty, adding FontForge and > Inkscape to your harddrives. When these two pieces of software are > strung together, they make other ways of doing design possible. We > will learn how to use the command line or console to communicate > differently with your computer, and experiment with new ways of > processing text through pattern matching using regular expressions. > > Free Operations proposes a two day sampler of what Open Source methods > could mean for design in general and typography in particular. It is a > way to think about authorship, software and distribution in relation > to your practice, and an invitation to explore new territory.
