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Jürg Lehni

Awarded

Jürg Lehni

'Rita'

Graphic Design

Jury report

Man- or machine made
How does one com­bine the most am­bi­tious pro­gram­ming tech­nique with at­trac­tive de­sign? Now Tokyo-based, Jürg Lehni has be­come known for 'Hek­tor', his diploma pro­ject cre­ated in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Uli Franke at the ECAL in 2002. The ma­chine, a 'Graf­fiti Out­put De­vice' – con­sist­ing merely of ca­bles, straps, sev­eral small en­gines, an aerosol can and a cal­cu­la­tor – which sprayed signs on the wall was a big at­trac­tion. The re­sult was as­tound­ing: the nav­i­gat­ing soft­ware 'Scrip­tog­ra­pher' con­verted draw­ings or type­faces into vec­tor graph­ics, con­trolled en­gines and fi­nally a sim­ple aerosol can nor­mally op­er­ated man­u­ally. It was a com­bi­na­tion of high and low tech, the ma­chine-pro­duced graf­fi­tis seemed as di­rect as if they were man-made. For the de­signer it is cru­cial to open up the scope of aes­thet­ics which can­not be achieved by the ex­ist­ing – heav­ily stan­dard­ised by big cor­po­ra­tions – soft- and hard­ware. It is note­wor­thy that this young in­ter­ac­tion de­signer reg­u­larly col­lab­o­rates with other de­sign­ers and artists. In 2003 he re­designed the web­site of the type­face label 'Lineto'. The web­site was sup­posed to dif­fer from es­tab­lished de­sign schemes, look more like a pro­gram and still be sim­ple and in­tu­itive to nav­i­gate. As his fol­low-up pro­ject to 'Hek­tor' Jürg Lehni de­vel­oped 'Rita'. It is a draw­ing de­vice in the form of a fixed wall in­stal­la­tion pro­duced for the Ten­sta Kon­sthall in Stock­holm. The de­vice can­not only draw and rub out lines with a pen­cil but also write fonts or even re­pro­duce draw­ings of artists in such a way that the elec­tron­i­cally nav­i­gated arm im­i­tates the flow of an artist's brush. With con­sis­tently as­tound­ing pro­jects the de­signer and soft­ware de­vel­oper Jürg Lehni man­ages to bridge the gap be­tween pro­gram­ming work, graph­ics and art.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Jürg Lehni
Born in
1978

Education
Designer HES, Visuelle Kommunikation, Studienbereich Neue Medie

also in

2003

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