The Morisawa 10 series was inspired by a visit to a Shikō Munakata exhibition in Japan, and also having been fascinated by emerging methods to work with letterforms on the computer. This set of pieces won the honor of the Tokyo Type Director’s Club Gold Prize and were later accessioned into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
They were all composed in the Adobe PostScript language (the predecessor to SVG) and were a little difficult to create because it was so expensive to make these images in the 90s. I needed to pay an exorbitant amount to render test images at scale through a repro service in Tokyo — which turned out okay because I bartered their printing of my images in exchange for my doing work for them for free.
Artist and educator Zach Lieberman recently had his students re-interpret these images dynamically and with much more powerful computers. It made me think how far we’ve come in computing capabilities thanks to Moore’s Law.
