Akiem Helmling / Underware
AENOT
Towards an expanded notion of type.
Media theorist and philosopher Vilém Flusser claimed that when Gutenberg invented
moveable type, the true achievement was not the ‘pragmatic industrialisation’ of language,
but the discovery that letters are not characters, but types. Although Gutenberg might not have
realised this himself, he completed a process which started with the invention of the alphabet,
and came to its full glory in the mass book production of the 20th century: Abstract and
typified thinking produced the age of science & technology.