Typismus

A canvas built the way computer vision sees the world: objects replaced by labeled boxes on black. The picture is not given, it is completed inside the viewer.

I borrow the machine's way of seeing and take interpretation away from it. The data does not come from a camera, it comes from my imagination, and nothing of the machine is left but its form.

Typismus began as a joke. A friend wrote in an art chat that he was busy with tupizm - a word that exists in no dictionary, yet every Russian instantly feels it: zoning out, doing nothing. A label without a definition, and you still get it. That is exactly how Typismus works.

What settled the name was not sound but shape: the Russian letter у and the German y look almost identical, and the German der Typ means both a type and a guy. One letter holding a system and a piece of stupidity at once.

The movement is open to anyone. Place a few boxes on a black canvas, encode your own meaning, and let others find theirs.

To compose these canvases I built Studio, my own tool.