Radical Machines

A traveling exhibition of the largest collection of Asian typewriters showcasing the engineering behind typing languages with thousands of characters.

Role

Identity, Exhibition Design, Illustration, Website

Focus

The identity system focuses on a "rift" down the center of content, referencing the gap between Western and Eastern typing technologies throughout history. This gap is where the Radical Machines exhibit exists, filling in the missing pieces of history behind these machines that was otherwise undocumented.

The first stop on the traveling exhibition was the Museum of Chinese in America in Chinatown, NYC

We developed an illustration system for all the machines on display to correspond with the noise texture seen across the site

All exhibition panels and materials feature the "rift" by creating a negative space that divides content left and right

The printed matter produced for the exhibition leveraged the "rift" by displaying content in the negative space in playful ways including footnotes, annotations, machine information, etc.