I chose cinema4D as my tool to continue exploring 2d and 3d. For the first week’s iteration, I experimented with various ways of creating typeface in the three-dimensional world, both in Chinese and English.
2D effectusing the basic shapes to creatpixel in 3Dtexture experimentusing letters to create shapes
As I changed the components and materials of the typeface, the question arose as: What does it mean when a text exists in a three-dimensional world? While thinking about this, I realised that everything around me can become a three-dimensional typeface because the real world is a three-dimensional world. So my answer for this question is: The x and y axes formed the two-dimensional world and the three-dimensional world added the z axis to the two-dimensional typeface, it means that the typeface became an “object” in the three-dimensional world.
In project of altering letters, Ryo Shimizu also explores the relationship between text and space. When texts are dismantled into completely new symbols, space creates an imagery with texts, i.e. the senses become more perceptually enriched and the focus is no longer on the textual information obtained directly from the words. In McLuhan’s terms, these symbolised words become a new medium and the message it carries changes. This led me to think about the transformation between text-object-text. When words become objects, this means that texts can carry things like objects, for example a glass of water can be placed on a text. So what if the glass of water was turned into words? Would it become an overlap of words or an overlap of objects? Or perhaps an overlap of objects and texts? What kind of image is created when the relationship between objects, such as carrying, containing, juxtaposing, is represented in type?
“And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something” —Immanuel Kant
With these 3d texts, I have composed Kant’s description of the thing in itself. Kant divides the world into appearances and the thing in itself; our perceptions exist only in appearances, the thing in itself is unknowable. I assume texts as the embodiment of appearances, and as the concept of texts and objects continue to merge, breaking down the perception of texts. It’s an exploration of the thing in itself.
