Following the editing of the International Design Year Book, the German publisher Albrecht Bangert and Otto Riewoldt asked me to design a touring exhibition of a selection of products chosen for the book. As we always spoke of it as “the i.d.y.b.” book, the first thoughts I had for the exhibition design involved these letters, and I had the idea to use them as a base for the exhibits. We drew them up 9-metres tall, including 1-metre full stops, cutting them horizontally to provide two levels for displaying objects of different sizes. In discussions with Anthony Moore, Professor of Sound at Cologne’s Academy of Media Arts, we took it further with the idea of “acoustic calligraphy”, which would move the sound along the letters as if writing them by hand, through a series of speakers mounted in the bases. Anthony’s soundtrack, mimicking the sounds of industrial production and consisting of 4 repeating electronic sounds, one per letter, played continuously, giving the impression that the letters were the production lines on which the exhibits had been assembled.
Extracted from Everything but the Walls by Jasper Morrison (Lars Müller Publishers, 2006)
