Peter Cho is a Los Angeles-based media artist, designer, and educator. He holds a Master of Science degree from the MIT Media Lab, where his design research explored custom models for typography in time-based and reactive media, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the UCLA Design | Media Arts department, where his work dealt with issues of language, writing, and meaning. He has received honors for his work from Ars Electronica, Tokyo Type Directors Club, New York Art Directors Club, ID Magazine, and Print Magazine. His work has been shown at the Telic Gallery, Ginza Graphic Gallery, Ars Electronica, Art Sonje, Seoul Arts Center, the Art Directors Club, and Cooper Union. His interests include issues of electronic textuality, narrative, and mapping.
Statement
My work stems from a long-time fascination with letters. These building blocks of written communication hold power as symbols that are at once representational and abstract. What are the secret lives of letters, and how can those lives be revealed? From an early age we learn to write letterforms in our own hand and recognize mechanically produced typeforms as the same symbols. When the keyboard replaces the pen as the writer's primary tool, we lose the visceral connection to the continuous handwritten mark in favor of the efficiency of digital reproduction. The relationship between the handwritten and the machine-made is a theme I explore in my work. I am interested in how the mechanically-produced visible word evokes an expressiveness and life all its own.
In my work, I am also interested in exploring the relationship between speech and written language. I am examining our basic assumptions about language and looking at connections between sound, writing, and meaning. One of the original assumptions of linguistic theory is that there is no inherent relationship between words and the meanings they represent, that the linguistic sign dog could just as well mean cat or vice versa. My recent work explores this assumption through visible language experiments. The Takeluma project explores these relationships through a series of examples across different media. In these works I am especially interested in what might be considered a synesthetic result: sound and visual tightly coupled, tied together through meaning. These works look at the boundaries and connections between sense and nonsense, between pattern and noise, between text and texture.