36 Days of Type

For the yearly 36 Days of Type challenge I explored the body as a form of input to manipulate and play with type.

The project resulted from the course preparation for Burg Halle together with Katja Rempel, with whom I form a generative design and research collective (Kollektiv Generativ). The topic of the course we prepared was Embodied Interaction and we quickly decided to go for mediapipe, an open-source machine learning algorithm developed by Google that allowed us to detect and track parts of the body with a simple webcam.

We both have a strong background in Processing and P5, so we managed to fuse P5 with mediapipe and ended up with a seamless web tracking solution for the body. This opened up a completely new perspective for us: using the body as an interface. We quickly discovered the potential of this new tool and the possibilities that suddenly opened up seemed endless and overwhelming. What you can see in the 36 Days of Type is merely the surface of possibilities and ideas we discussed.

It was a good opportunity to exercise them through typography and letter shapes as the defining visual element. Most of these ideas originated from pen and paper sketches, where I would brainstorm and visualise concepts before translating them into actual code.

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