The Digital Poetics and Politics summer institute convened in Kingston, Ontario in August 2004. This weeklong gathering was organized and hosted by the Department of Film Studies at Queen’s University. For me, the experience was a refreshing change from the rather bloated international conferences I’d been more used to attending, which often involve hundreds – or even thousands – of academics in one cavernous hotel, multiple concurrent sessions, a constant flow of panel-hoppers and unfocused question periods, all organized around an everything-and-nothing umbrella theme.

DPP (or ‘digipopo’ as it quickly became known) involved a group of about thirty of us. We were able to focus our collective attentions on a set of shared themes and issues, with everyone – artists, activists, media-makers and scholars – making some kind of presentation of work-in-progress to everyone else during the week. We also had break-out workgroups, demos, performances, installations, and one cracking barbeque.

Sometime in 2005 the idea emerged to gather the work produced at digipopo in a special issue of the journal Public. Working with Susan Lord, Dorit Naaman and grad student Kristy Holmes at Queen’s, a design and production team (comprising myself, Glenn Gear, and Miriam Verburg) set out to create the new issue. The three of us worked together on a common overall theme that attempted to capture the sense of work-in-progress and anti-technicism that permeated the event itself.

The overall format was borrowed (with permission) from Emigre, a digital type foundry that, until recently, published its own highly influential graphic design magazine. The format allowed us to represent all of the work that came out of digipopo – papers, images, soundworks, videos, films, web and interactive works – by creating a printed booklet, a DVD, and a website. (A dummy of Public #31 can be seen here.)

Glenn (an incredibly talented artist/animator) ultimately took care of designing and authoring the DVD; Miriam (who has her own web design company) designed, programmed and populated the website (with a little last-minute editing help from Paul Hanlon); and I took on the sleeve and 32-page booklet (pdf here).

The issue is now out (phew!) and we look forward to feedback (and hopefully a small launch party).

I wrote a while back about a sign on Highway 401 that had a peculiar mistake in it – one letter had been mounted backwards. Which brings us to the HBO series Deadwood. Focusing on the premise that life was short – and largely unpleasant – in the new frontier towns of nineteenth century America, Deadwood is a cracking revisiting of the cowboy/western genre. An early episode (S1, E6) about an outbreak of smallpox has the main characters poring over the local newspaperman’s page proofs as he inks up in the middle of main street. Anyway, the intentional quirk in the main title (above) is a reversed ‘W’, which speaks volumes, in the subtlest of ways, about the nature of the muddy, lawless hole in question. Unless I’m mistaken, however, it’s nigh on impossible to reverse a letter using letterpress; invert, maybe, but not set backwards. At least not unintentionally. More on this as soon as I find out for sure. First stop will be to check in with the Typophiles.

It’s sometimes called ‘public writing’ or ‘public lettering’ or ‘found type’, but whatever it is, it’s a joy to behold. The example above belongs to a lovingly restored tractor on display at a county fair in Ontario.

Here are three websites devoted to the stuff:

Public Lettering explores London;

TypoCity explores Mumbai;

Typophile gathers contributors’ examples from all over the world.

My own small, but growing, collection can be found here.

And the typographic error on this sign is…

…the ‘V’ in ‘BROCKVILLE’ has been set backwards.

This sign can be seen heading West on the 401 in Ontario; the matching sign, visible from the 401 heading East, is set correctly. (The signs are set in Friz Quadrata.)