Symposium and Media Art Exhibition on the current state and future of letters in motion in art, design and space. Under the title ‘MOVING TYPES – Gutenberg goes Media’, the phenomenon of the dynamic type and its added value compared to its static counterpart in an increasingly multimedia and convergent world.

The event was held at the Gutenberg Museum – the symbolic location for the history of printing, writing and books. And this, in the city in which media companies such as the ZDF TV-Channel, the spirit and legacy of Johannes Gutenberg and extraordinary training expertise in the areas of typography and media all meet…

Moreover this location hosted the media art exhibition ‘Akademos – A Place for Poets and Philosophers’, comprising media work from the young up-and-coming generation of artists, its presence will be felt far beyond this festival…

The exhibition features more than 70 selected works that impressively showcase the “Poetry and Philosophy in Motion” theme using moving text. Poems and texts by many authors, including Arthur Rimbaud, Hannah Arendt, Mascha Kaléko, Hermann Hesse, Pablo Neruda, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Socrates, or song texts by Maria Peszek and Johnny Tilloston form the starting point for artistic and audiovisual interpretations. The spectrum ranges from poetry clips, typography films and music videos to interactive spatial installations, taking ‘Text in Motion’ to a new multi-sensory level of experience.

Akademos also wants to be seen as a stage and forum seeking dialogue and interaction, encouraging people to participate in shaping and changing our ‘World in Motion’ on the basis of our historical roots and reflected in the context of today, in this moment and in tomorrow’s world.

The MOTYF Festival 2018 took place in Dublin from 31.10. – 04.11.2018.

Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand will host the 2021 MOTYF Festival from 17 to 19 March 2021.

The “core” of the z zg is the comprehensive and unique archive, “Time-based Typography – Moving Types”. To date, Stöffler and Dringenberg have compiled over 800 visual examples of animated typefaces and letters in film, advertising, on the Internet and in public space – encompassing the inception film up to the networked and multidimensional Internet of Things of our times. In addition, they have conducted interviews with leading protagonists of this scene and have likewise recruited them. As a consequence, the archive is simultaneously a highly respected state-of-the-art compendium and who’s who of the industry as well as a frequently cited history of visual animation from the bygone 19th century up to the beginning of the 21st century.

Dringenberg and Stöffler develop modern and multimedia media presentations on the basis of these archives, which render the visual and animated communication of the space graphically tangible. The “showpiece” of this work is the already repeatedly displayed and award-winning exhibition, “Moving Types – Letters in Motion”. In this exhibition, film samples seemingly hovering in cyberspace portray the history and impact of animated typeface using an unusual modernistic exhibition design which are simultaneously rendered as interactively tangible in the context of a social media project that encompasses all facets of social communities. A second, closely associated project is the generation of interactive “media facades”, on which social messages in the public space can be projected – for example, with the inclusion of passers-by. Exhibitions and facades in particular are “living” examples of a new spatial form of the Internet, social media and social networking.