Radiant Signs

About

Radiant Signs is a five day screen printing workshop exploring sign systems, pictograms and visual miscommunication through drawing experiments, paper cuts and modular stencil printing.

Signs leave their mark on public spaces. They inscribe and demarcate places, communicate rules and regulations. They can declare property and access rights. They can direct, warn, inform, prohibit, and explain. Signs speak their own language, combining symbols with typography, indexes, and pictograms. They are often designed with cross-cultural communication in mind, sometimes even with aspirations towards a universal visual language - and yet the most seemingly intuitive signs are not necessarily understood beyond their cultural context. In this five-day course, we will work with the resistance caused by the partially or incorrectly deciphered sign: what happens when an attempt at graphic communication goes astray? What unforeseen paths might it take us on? What happens when coincidence, deliberate misreading and nonsense are suddenly thrown into the mix?

We will talk about signs in urban spaces, both in reference to Berlin and the various home cities of the course participants. We will explore visual languages and pictograms through drawing and paper cut experiments. With the striking design of traffic and warning signs in mind, we will play with positive and negative space, with iconic and typographical elements both conventional - and a little more unusual. The aim is to create personal sign systems that will be arranged into a series of modular screenprints. The meanings that are created by combining and recombining these signs and symbols can be associative and cryptic.

Students will learn to use analog stencil printing techniques using 1-2 colours. Each participant will make a limited edition of about eight different prints on card, finished with a colour cut.

Course leader

Charlotte Hornung and Jo Rüßmann.

Fee info