Between the Full and the Empty was the 2017 semester one lecture series at UTS Landscape Architecture, which explored a range of atmospheric and marginal urban phenomena from the perspectives of architecture and landscape architecture. What struck us about the topics for the series, was that they were not immediately architectural — exploring such phenomena as ghosts in architecture, gender in architecture and the notion of a paramilitary garden in Singapore.
The way we approached the series, and subsequently the concept for the posters, was to create a sense of framing, both in the typography and in a cinematic layout of image, which was informed by research into early cinema and specifically the work of Eadweard Muybridge. This motif of framing served as a device for allowing tension, atmosphere and a sense of the micro within the Muybrigde-like reel of images. The cinematic reel, for us, also suggested a fleeting moment, or movement through time, which certainly seemed to speak to such a series exploring the ephemeral, the marginal and the atmospheric.
In addition to its more formalised line-up of speakers, Between the Full and the Empty also featured guest lecturers, who were to appear at different dates throughout the semester. The brief was thus to create a series of posters for this guest lecture series, which was to sit within the same family as the primary series of posters for Between the Full and the Empty, though stand alone as separate.
Our concept was to create a sense of a ‘broken frame’ — to reflect the less structured schedule of the guest lecture series. We did so by breaking the more gridded, or structured layout of the primary posters. The dynamic, angled typography certainly lends a sense of chaos and disorder, which we hoped might reflect quite an unannounced series of guest lecturers, ‘breaking’ a more formalised timetable.
