PICA is proud to present the first Australian screening of Berlin-based Ignacio Uriarte’s new film entitled The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow (2009). In the film, actor/comedian Michael Winslow, famous for his role in the slapstick Police Academy movies and his gifted ability to orally mimic any sound, is seen in a studio recording an oral history of the typewriter.
To complement this work, Uriarte has created seven prints on paper for PICA that each depict one of the seven font types installed in 90% of all Macs and PCs worldwide today including Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. The prints show the character of each font type as Uriarte has typed out the full alphabet in an optically mesmeric composition.
The Invention of Letters brings together a significant film and a new suite of works on paper by Uriarte that begin a prescient dialogue between analogue and digital, audio and text which takes place across a century, but looks into the future of the written word.