"The Typographer's Guide to the Galaxy" / An interview with Oded Ezer
Some of the more interesting typographers are rather strange people, the kind who looks at the world through a letter-shaped prism, always in a search, for the perfect font, the perfect form of language. Oded Ezer is the worse kind. His quest is not for the new form, nor the perfect one. His indulges himself in looking into the future of typography, and how it takes itself out of the page or the screen and embeds itself in our bodies, spaces, and most basic human experiences.
Oded Ezer is an award winning, commercially successful (and hates it)typographer, graphic designer and artist.
The interview took place at his home, in the city of Givaataim (a sleepy suburb of Tel-Aviv), July 4th, 2006. It evolved in way that required directioning rather than questioning, and therefore it is quasi-uncut, rather free-flowing.
"On my business card it says..."
I studied graphic design in Bezalel design academy in Jerusalem. Graphic design studies in Bezalel was a war for me. The system was very Israeli...the Israeli mentality of achieving the goals at all costs was foreign for me, difficult for me to digest. There was something very Spartan in there: driven by force, prestige, the desire to concur. I took a semester at Middlesex university, and only then I realized how fun design could really be. It was the first time I enjoyed design. It wasn’t like if you put something on the wall than YOU are hung on the wall. I hardly graduated, although all along I was quite a good student...
Q: How do you label yourself professionally?
A: I have no idea. On my business card it says “Typography”. It’s not an adjective. I’m oded ezer, and I do typography. I’m not a Typographer. it’s like a garment I’m wearing. I don’t like it but people do and so it's necessary. Basically I’m working in two parallel paths. The first is the natural path of a working designer. I do quite well in that respect. I make a good living, I’m getting published, I do well in competitions, I do everything I'm "supposed" to do to be successful. I’m doing that, but this is so boring for me. I’m not cut out for that. I know I will do well, and this predictability is killing me. I know it sounds bad, but this is who I am. Also, being Israeli, the desire to fuse the Israeli with the European, with London, Amsterdam, Milano, Barcelona, is something I don’t like very much.
"The Empty Field"
The other path is the frightening one, "the unknown". I don’t have a name for it. And to me, this is what being a designer is all about.
And here, in Israel, this path of the unknown is very difficult to maintain. Everybody wants to make a living, everybody wants to be successful and I respect that. I do. But I have to search for something else. I still don’t know what I’m searching for. Maybe that what makes me a designer, and everyone else are just generators of “design products”. Maybe I’m wrong and just very vein…
So my solution to this conflict was to divide myself into two, otherwise I would have gone crazy. I told myself this: during the day I’ll be a whore, a bitch, but at night, then I become a son-of-a-bitch. I work extremely fast in my commercial work. My typographic skills are excellent. I can do in one day what others do in a week. That allows me to earn my bread and also make the time for the truly important stuff.
It's been 6 years I’ve started my search, skipping from place to place, exploring my options. I would send completely crazy posters to competitions all over, and they would win prices although they are nothing more than a graphic expressions of an internal process I was going through at the time.
For example, I won first prize in a poster competition in Nagoya, Japan. It was the first poster I made in the “Plastica” collection. So they sent me a ticket. I came from England, where I was working at the time, to Japan. During the event, the head of the jury, a famous Japanese designer, stood in front of my poster, and said quietly in English: "I think it is a very beautiful poster". That’s it, nothing more. To me, however, it meant that he accepted what I was trying to express, to convey. In most cases, when people (designers or otherwise) come across my work, they say two things: "it’s amazing", and "I don’t understand this".
Most of my work doesn’t come from tradition of graphic design or typography. I know all the design giants I’m supposed to know, but my work does not come from the Israeli graphic or artistic culture. The people who influence my work are musicians, biologists, scientists, not necessarily designers.
Ok, so what do I do, you ask? I do classical commercial graphic design work. I do logos, image design, graphic print etc., then I design fonts. It’s nice, because I work like an artist, I sit at home, design new fonts, sell them, and feel very good about myself, but it’s just font design, nothing more...ahh, I do also "corporate fonts", which pays nicely.
Q: How long does it take you to create a font?
A: Between a month and a few years.
And then there’s the "empty field", where I’m still a student. The empty field is the place where everything mixes and comes together. This is where I do a lot of things but rarely there’s a product, this is where my ideas, skills, self, even my relationship with my wife integrate...this is where the truth lives, at least for me. I love the truth. The truth of the material, the smell, the music, the essence of things. And people can’t accept the truth. Myself included.
I live well with myself. I love it. I’m fuckin’ 34 years old. People my age have families, offices, they do projects, they go to work everyday, they don’t make much more money than me, and most of them lie most of the time. This is the way I see it anyway. And I’ve spared myself of that. So what was the question?
Biotypography...
Q: Let’s talk about Biotypography. What the hell is it? How did it start? What? Why? Where?
A: These are Ant-letters, of course...it’s a natural move that I made to see what will happen to typography in the future. So I sit at my desk, and I set myself some working rules (like not using anything typographical that is around me), and I essentially ask: "What would a typographer be in 50 years?"
Q: I still don’t understand the ants...
A: I know, I’ll tell you this. Recently I gave a lecture I titled: "The Typographer’s Guide to the Galaxy", so in preparation I explored a little bit the topic of cloning. I saw the mice with an ear as a letter and it blew me away...in fact, my question was in which technologies I could manufacture a medium wherein typography could develop, evolve - into something completely different.
Q: still don’t understand...
A: Ok. Very briefly. Typography is about the mechanization of letters. From the moment print was invented till our times. To separate it form Calligraphy, it is the reproduction, design, copying, mechanization of letters. Right? So the different technologies have impacted typography over the years, until today’s desktop publishing systems, and this is where typography is today, and how it is taught. In my approach I’m trying to view everything that comes from letters – as typography. I’m trying to investigate the new media into which typography can develop. So, for example, in the Biotypography example, typogrphay relates to the body, to bodily deformation or cloning. In this project, as part of the process, I would ask: Why not make an animal into the letter “F”?
Q: So you create an animal, an ant, which is a letter. where does it live?
A: The first and most truthful answer is that I don’t know. I can speculate, but I don’t know. The "F" by itself cannot do much. But together with its friend, the "U", the "C", the "Y" and the "K", it can say "FUCK YOU", for example. Or imagine my ants, the mutated letters, gathering, as a collective, and express a message that we can understand, like "food", or something…
I don’t know, I have no idea what I’m doing. Maybe I’m just doing bullshit stuff, maybe I’m a prophet. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I play games. I open doors and whoever wants to enter is welcome. People after me will do things much more interesting. I’m still in the dark...what is the meaning of one wire touching another and creating a spark? You can make a circus show out of it and people will enjoy it and clap their hands, or you can light up the entire world, or start of the digital universe. So I don’t know...
Stretch, Stretch, Stretch...
This is a project about stretching. This is something that interests me a lot theoretically, things that Albert Einstein was researching about the stretching of time, for example, but also on the level of the materiality and tangibility of stretching. I made this poster as a tribute to Yona Volach (one of greatest and most provocative Israeli poets, now dead, ef). She wrote a poem called "Stami and Klumi" (impossible to translate, but if I have to: "Mr. Unimportant and Mr. Nothing"), so the image in my head was of the nothingness of the gum, an entity that stretches for no good reason.
In this project, the flexible keyboard, for example, or the button-like switch sitting on a finger got me really excited, not because of what it can do but because I could clearly see possibilities in my work, so I started attaching letters to my own body, my own face...the connection is between the letter to the face part, kind of an evolution of both. I begun the process in a graphical manner, but then I tried to implement it physically, play the game. So this augmentation, deformation of the body, the revelation of its typographical perspective – is what turns me on. I think about typographical means all the time, just because this is where I feel free and safe. Sort of like my language and me are evolving together.
5 Small Rooms...
These are leeches. "Leech letters"...Simulations of doors, of different words. This is an investigation of space, really. These are like verbal ambassadors existing in space. They don’t mean anything, supposedly, and they don’t make sense, but they are letters on a wall. Why this letter and not another? What is its story? This is the game I’m playing with the viewer...when I look at it, I see a kind of a nose attached to a wall, which leads me to smelling.
But thinking about the viewers, I’m trying to create an experience, with nonsense words, I’m canceling the meaning of the word, and getting in return a gift, the reaction of the viewer to the material, the form, the space, the atmosphere. As a viewer you might reject it, and it's fine, I don’t care, but you will probably feel something. This is typography that creates an experience, and if I can do that, that’s a good enough reason for me to go on living...
Q: Why do you attach yourself to a letter? Why letters?
A: It’s a good question that I have been asked a lot. The true answer is that I don’t know and I don’t want to know. There’s a little bit of death in answering that. Look, I could have worked with just a simple circle, or a glass, or whatever just the same. But a letter is both the content and the object that carries it. Is it a "thing" or a "symbol of a thing"? Or both? I relate to these places because for me, when I make a hairy circle, it is a hairy circle. But if I write the word "circle" in a hairy way, it opens up a whole new field for interpretation. And this is what I like about typography. This is why I’m a typographer. I love hating the letters, love them, betray them or be loyal to them. It’s a toy store.
This is the another sketch by Oded. One of his first works. To me it has a "Stark-ian" feel to it...
interview by EyalFried
Links
An online exhibition of Oded Ezer's poster, on Rene Wanner's Web Poster Exhibition
Images
All photos by Idan gil, Shaxaf Haber and Oded Ezer.