Gebruiker:Gobble Rot/Kladblok

Loraine Furter

Biography

Loraine Furter (born 20 april 1988, Lausanne Switzerland) is a graphic designer, publisher, and educator with Armenian, Swiss, and French heritage, though since 2007, she lives in and works from Brussels, Belgium. She is specialized in hybrid publishing (both physical and digital publishing), which allows her to experiment with different forms of design, editing, and curating. Research also dominates a large part of her work, which combines hybrid, written, and visual productions.

Furter only became aware of the possibility to become a graphic designer professionally when she moved to Belgium, before that, in Switzerland, she aspired to become an illustrator. Once in Belgium, she became interested in the history of graphic design throughout different countries (specifically the ones she had a connection to, like Armenia), and discussing this history with other people.

In her master’s at école de recherche graphique, known as ERG, Furter specialized in editorial design and publishing practices -mainly in paper publishing- but already showed interest in oral, performative, and experimental publishing, though she saw digital publishing as something “other” than what she was doing.

It was through meeting the people involved in the collective Open Source Publishing and in the Berlin-based Hybrid Publishing Group that she was introduced to the fields of digital and hybrid publication. She learned HTML and CSS, and started working in digital publishing as a researcher, while her background in experimental publishing made her question the “genres” of publication.

Teaching

Furter teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and école reserche graphique in Brussels, where she utilizes pedagogical tools to approach graphic design with a feminist perspective. As she believes it’s important to work both on theory and practice, as complementary approaches.

At the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Furter teaches two theory classes on contemporary publishing, in which she focuses on the fact that no teaching is ever neutral. According to Furter, every teaching is informed by a specific point of view, which influences the way one selects, analyses, and presents works. Her classes are informed by intersectional feminism.

Since she started teaching theory and historical classes, Furter has become aware that the references she chooses to present become her student’s historical context, so she takes care to take a critical approach. For instance, when she started she went back to look over her own history classes from when she was a student, which showed almost exclusively works from male artists, so she decided to build her own more inclusive curriculum.

Furter also teaches an advanced masterclass on Research in Art and Design in Sint Lucas Antwerp, which focuses on research development of artists and designers whose practice is anchored in a social-political context. The program develops in accordance with the specific research proposals of the participants and offers intense coaching in research methodology, writing, and critical studies. Collective learning and participatory coaching are central to the program. There is also a strong focus on sharing research; this means collectively designing productive formats to share insights and creating a sustainable international research network.

She believes it’s important to acknowledge the agency of her students, because they are often the ones to bring up the importance of global movements for gender and racial equality such as Me Too, Times Up, and Black Lives Matter. She finds it her job as a teacher to constantly update herself through the help of these big activist movements, situating struggles and being able to work on them, transforming and contributing to diversifying things. This is also why she thinks research is so important, it needs to become a practice before every piece of design.

She wishes to encourage students to ask questions, but to also bring their own perspectives into the discussions in her classes. It’s not necessarily about what is a successful assignment or not, but about the process, which can lead to very different things.

Feminism

Furter is part of the cyberfeminist collective Just for the Record, who work to alleviate the biases in online collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia. In her works Furter most often discusses subjects such as capitalism, patriarchy, and intersectional feminism.

She believes that the underrepresentation of women in graphic design is a larger systemic issue; it’s not only linked to design, it’s linked to society as a whole. The problems lie with those in the decision making roles, those who are already dominant in representation: white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc. They decide who gets invited to graphic design conferences, and what is discussed. Furter feels representation should be taken into account when organizing these festivals.

These issues only became important to Furter after her studies. She feels there was never a focus on these issues when she was in school, and as she was a white woman, was blinded by privilege to these issues. It was only when she started teaching herself, that she saw how underrepresented minorities were, and made the decision to turn this into a research project. She started questioning: who, why, what is included and what is not, and saw biases everywhere.

As Furter worked more and more with a feminist approach, she became increasingly aware of the importance of the tools and materials that graphic designers use, including where these tools and materials come from, who designed them, and how. She believes that the principles free and open-source software are complementary to a feminist approach: making things transparant; showing how they are constructed; opening them for deconstruction, changes, and suggestions; making them available and inclusive; and considering them as works in progress and not just final results.

She finds graphic design to be a position of power, because as a designer, one gets to create representations. This position of power can be used in different ways -and one way is to show more inclusive representations, empower others, and use design for activist projects. Furter believes the representations we are used to seeing and producing as graphic designers are informed by history and the society we live in, which she sees as patriarchal, sexist, racist, classist, and ableist. She sees intersectional feminism, which considers these intersecting fields, as useful in addressing these issues.

Projects

Bye Bye Binary

A workshop on gender fluid glyphs for typography, which was very hands on and practical. The outcomes were gender fluid ways of expressing these. In French, for instance, the language is very gendered; it is only binaries like “she” and “he”. Because you can’t use “they”, the researchers were looking for different ways to embrace gender identity and inclusivity of different gender identities through typography.

Badass Libre Fonts by Womxn

A collection of open-source fonts designed by women, in reaction to the realization that most fonts Furter used before this project were designed by men, and that fonts designed by women-identified designers were difficult to find.

Just For The Record

A collection of artists organizing events and interventions around the gender imbalance on Wikipedia, which started as a side project -though now it informs all facets of Furter’s work, design, and teaching in a positive way.

Crystal Clear

An article about the inequality women faced during the invention and popularization of the printing press. Since the beginning of the industry, western typography has always been a gendered field, dominated and designed by white men -this article is a look at the role women played in the printing industry.

Speaking Volumes

Speaking Volumes -art, activism and feminist publishing is a hybrid research project about feminist publishing practices between art and activism -a blind history of artists’ books. The research takes different forms; from graphic documents to performative events, and materializes on a display inspired by Alison Knowles’ artwork The Big Book, a giant structure with oversized pages she built in 1966.

How many female type designers do you know?

How many female type designers do you know? is a book written by Yulia Popova, which aims to shine light on work of women in type. The first part of the book offers research on the gender issue in the type design field, including statistics, data, and an overview of some works that address this issue. Further it contains some biographies of female type designers that worked in the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century.

The second part is a series of interviews with fourteen women that are either currently working as type designers or are in any way involved in the field of type design. These interviews intend to uncover the topic of inequality between male and female speakers at type conferences, as well as the lack of women in the industry. Loraine Furter is one of these women.

Influences

Some of Furter's role models include; Sheila Levrant de Bretteville for what she did as a feminist graphic designer, Muriel Cooper because she dealt with new technologies that usually were identified as "male" tools, the Guerrilla Girls for their intelligent and graphically well made work, Gran Fury and Fierce Pussy for bringing together art and activism during the aids crisis, and Martine Syms whose work reflects on the cultural history of radical black thoughts.