“Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New…

E: Hey, where’s that blog post you were going to finish two weeks ago? A: I, uh, have been working on it. E: Really? It looked to me like you were watching movies. A: I was refreshing my memory. E: Uh huh. What’s this post about then? A: It’s about Jean-Luc Godard. And it’s done. Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most radical of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, is an artist whose imaginative typographic title sequences…

How does one prove the Earth is round? In February of 1966, during an acid trip on a rooftop in San Francisco, Stewart Brand began contemplating the curvature of the Earth. The horizon sloped away from him on either side, buildings refused to stand parallel, and the flat-earth fallacy became viscerally apparent. He was determined to broadcast this feeling, and called for a solution (in the form of a…

“On the first Sunday of 1969 Robert Barry went to Central Park with four capsules of radioactive material in his pocket. He had ordered them from a scientific supply catalog, choosing an isotope of his namesake, barium-133, the only one of twenty-two known isotopes of the element that does not dangerously decay within seconds or minutes. He walked to the Great Lawn behind the Metropolitan Museum of…

This morning design director and curator Andrew Blauvelt spoke about Walker design at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of a public program series featuring 2009 National Design Awards recipients. The Walker was this year’s winner in Corporate and Institutional Achievement. Andrew spoke about technology and design alongside Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel, later taking questions from…

This is a longer version of the interviews with visual arts fellows Dan Byers and Andria Hickey, anddesign fellows Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and Noa Segal, from a story in the July/August issue ofWalkermagazine. For nearly three decades, the Walker has been recruiting recent graduates and junior professionals to work as fellows in its design and visual arts departments. As full-time, full-fledged staff…

As far as I can tell, Scott Thomas was here at the Walker as recently as last November when we screened the film Typeface, featuring his group The Post Family (verified, I think, by this interview with local letterpress firm Studio on Fire, who also presented their work at the same screening). Though come to think of it, that screening took place only a couple of days after Barack Obama’s election win…

It was announced this week that the Walker is the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Corporate Achievement for 2009. The award is given to institutions that “use design as a strategic tool of its mission and exhibits ingenuity and insight in helping to advance the relationship between design and quality of life in the United States.” Some previous winners were Apple, Google…

“This unconventional show does not present the students’ graphic works as design objects but instead shows them as a single illuminated collage which constantly rearranges itself. Print, motion, interactive, and site-specific design will be shown through video projection. When the gallery’s lights are off, the videos provide a shared, immersive experience of designed pieces. When the lights come on, the…