UCLA chemistry and physics professor Thomas Mason’s “LithoPartical Dispersions: Colloidal Alphabet Soup” is on exhibit in “StereoType: New directions in typography” at the Boston Society of Architects Space (BSA Space).
The artwork is video projected from a camera-equipped optical microscope focused on "Brownian letters" -- microscopically tiny letters that are suspended in fluid and move around randomly in a "Brownian motion." Mason created the alphabet in his UCLA laboratory, where he and his research team design and fabricate novel colloidal architectures and study their physical properties.
"The exhibition presents some of the boldest experiments in typography today, created by a new breed of artists from around the world," the BSA Space said of the artwork.
The Boston Globe wrote of the work by Mason, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute: “One especially techy piece in the exhibition comes from ... Thomas Mason, who’s concocted a tiny alphabet — in typesetting terms, it’s 1/300th of a point — and can only be viewed through an optical microscope. The minuscule letters are ostensibly good for labeling cells in a laboratory setting, but their vanishing size mimics the way type has receded from the corporeal world into the digital plane."
The BSA exhibition runs through May 25, and then travels to venues across the United States through 2016. An earlier version of 'Colloidal Alphabet Soup" appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; learn more here.
