For the Love of Line and Pattern:
Studies Inspired by Alphabets and Music

Exhibition of Drawings by Douglas Hofstadter Opens March 30 at Cooper Union and runs through April 30, 1999.

"Fugue and Canon, Letter and Spirit, Form and Content"
Great Hall Lecture by Douglas Hofstadter, Cognitive and Computer Scientist -- March 30, 1999

An exhibition of drawings by Douglas Hofstadter, "For the Love of Line and Pattern: Studies Inspired by Alphabets and Music", will open at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 30, in Cooper Union's Great Hall Gallery. That evening at 6:30 in the college's Great Hall, Hofstadter will give a lecture about his sketches, inspired by calligraphic and sonic forms of art. His talk is sponsored by the Gerald Philips Lecture Series and the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography (http://www.cooper.edu/art/lubalin).

The Great Hall, Great Hall Gallery and Lubalin Study Center are located in Cooper Union's Foundation Building, 7th Street at Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. The exhibition runs through April 30.

Gallery hours:
Weekdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.;
Saturdays 12 to 5 p.m.
For more information contact Lawrence Mirsky, director of the Study Center, at (212) 353-4214.

Douglas Hofstadter is College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and director for the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gvdel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid and former columnist for Scientific American, Hofstadter has combined his love of writing with the launching of novel research projects in artificial intelligence, involving anagrams and the design of artistic alphabets.

Hofstadter's work is influenced most of all by letterforms from the Indian subcontinent, and to a lesser extent by iron grillwork, Arabic calligraphy, floral motifs and Mayan and Aztec patterns. He created a large number of long, thin, scroll-like pen drawings in an attempt to realize a kind of visual counterpart to musical polyphony, imitating such highly structured musical forms as fugue and canon. He will discuss this totally improvisatory art form and its multiple connections to both writing systems and music.

Hofstadter also will discuss the cognitive processes involved in style invention and typeface design, through reference to his so-called "gridfonts" -- a set of extremely stylized alphabets he designed under a set of constraints that force letters out to the very fringes of legibility. He will explore the limits of style and what makes a style artistically valid.


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