Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

This is Design Matters with Debbie Milman from design observer.com.

On this program, Debbie Milman talks with Odette Ezer about how his limitations as a musician and poet led to his extraordinary adventures in typography.

We train to ask how does this type look and I claim that what we really have to ask is how does this type behave?

Here's Debbie Melman.

Is typography design or art?

Nothing provokes that question more insistently than the work of

Oded Ezer who calls himself a typographic experimentalist. Ezer's experiments include implanting typographic information

into fictional spermatizoa.

In another project, he bound, gagged, and racked Latin and Hebrew letters as if to torture them into telling us the truth about who they really are.

Ezer has also created installations and videos, and he recently collaborated with novelist

Jonathan Saffron 4 on a new Hagata.

He lives in Israel, but he's currently artist and residence at the Rhode Island School of Design.

He's here in New York to talk about the art and design of typography and some of his recent projects. Odette Ezer, welcome to Design Matters.

Hello.

So, Oded, I saw a video of a talk you presented at Design in Dabba,

wherein you introduced yourself in the following way.

My name is Oded Ezer and I am a typoholic.

So what does that mean, being a typoholic?

Well, I can speak with someone on the street and don't even listen to what he has to say but imagine his words as letters flying in the air.

Things like that.

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