About
Courier New New, 2017 - ongoing
"Courier is a font which has been of great importance in the recent history of typography, due to it's first inclination as a monospaced slab serif typeface designed to resemble the output from a strike-on typewriter. The typeface was designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler in 1955, and it was later redrawn by Adrian Frutiger for the IBM Selectric Composer series of electric typewriters. After the rise of the personal computer, Monotype revived the now dated Courier by digitizing it, creating Courier New- a standard font for email message services. Many digital applications still use it. The process of digitizing the font directly resulted in some very thin outlines, because the typewriter's ball was designed deliberately thinner than the intended character stroke width since these expand as ink soaks into the paper. Courier New features higher line space than Courier. Punctuation marks are reworked to make the dots and commas heavier. Because IBM deliberately chose not to seek any copyright, trademark, or design patent protection, the Courier typeface cannot be trademarked or copyrighted and is completely royalty free."from wikipedia
I engaged with the mediums transparency by creating an alternative of the Courier typeface, Courier New New (2017-ongoing). Courier was of great historical importance, being the most-used font for typewriters and being the first typeface to be digitised (called Courier new). Courier is the little noticed but most pervasive form of language we encounter. Courier is, for example, also the standardised typeface for screenplays and scripts. The strict formatting ensures that 90 pages of script writing translates to roughly 90 minutes of screentime. Yet type-faces as a medium go by mostly unregistered, their shapes and particularities often transparent and occluded by the meaning of the text it transmits. In Courier New New, I try to deny this transparency. I extended the serifs of Courier to form continuous structures, resembling the graphic shapes of time-lines. The visual style of Courier New New conversely occludes the meaning within a text, its function as an image overcoming its readability. Because of this Courier New New is unfit for use in large blocks of texts - or for regular writing practices Currently I use Courier New New for the production of short text-animations, where single words flash on the screen; the limitations the medium poses used as a way to write differently. The work is an attempt at forefronting the medium, the medium's possibilities and limitations as things that inform thinking. As such, writing with the typeface is for me a means of accumulating meaning: rather than a focus on individual texts, all texts are bound by the immediacy of the image the typeface offers. Through the image and context of the typeface, as well as rhythm, the loop, punctuation and contents, these animations are considered part of a complex ecosystem of thinking about time, the practice of history, memory, documentation and description. As the original Courier font is deliberately royalty free (which assists in its overrepresentation), Courier New New is available on my website for free as well. Everyone who uses the font is asked to partake in the communal effort of finding new definitions of time. On this webpage I keep an archive of these definitions.
Get the font here: (let me know if you use it and wish to take part in the archiving process)
Archive
Some kind of analogue of time travel (2019).
Time Travel
The rustle of language (2021).
The Rustle of Language
The body, constrained in the shape of an hourglass (2022).
The body, constrained in the shape of an hourglass
User generated definitions (2021).
In early 2021 I asked a group of colleagues to answer three time related questions; How do we use time, how do we get used to time and how are we used by time? All of these entries where then added into a list of possibilities from which a very simple code constructs temporary alternative definitions of time.