Gesture as data: explorations in hybrid calligraphy

Session 6

Saturday, 2 October 2021

6:00 PM CST – 6:30 PM CST

Talk

Tech

  • Portuguese
This talk is about calligraphy - the ancestor of typography. But not calligraphy as we know it - hand, pen, ink, paper. It's about calligraphy in another realm: the digital and algorithmical. I will show my most important work made since 2019. All of them mix calligraphy and programming. By coding with the data that comes from my hand gestures I can break, recombine and create the ductus in new and unexpected ways. These ways will be the main content of this presentation. I will also share the insights that I got from this ongoing practice regarding calligraphy, computation and the new expressive capabilities that the mix of these two areas can have. After this talk I hope the audience come to see calligraphy and programming in a more poetic sense and feel inspired to find their own way into calligraphy or creative coding, as I did.
  • Mariana Leal

    Brazil

    Mariana Leal is a calligrapher, painter and creative coder currently living in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2015, during the gestural warm-ups for her job in calligraphy for invitations, she fell in love for its free flowing forms and all the mobility of the body that it demands to be made. In 2019, she started to mix calligraphy and programming, creating what she calls a "hybrid calligraphy": half gestures made by human hand, half algorithms processed by a computer.

    Today her artistic research consists on investigating the expressive possibilities of the calligraphic mobility in concrete and digital/algorithmical realms.

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