TheCiva media art festivalhighlights the interplay between contemporary technologies, realities, and experiences across digital, physical, and hybrid spaces. This year’s festival and exhibition,|indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus|, focuses on the realm of quantum physics. […] The artists engage with quantum concepts through poetic gestures, multi-layered embodied experiences, and playful abstraction. The festival is hosted byBelvedere 21. DesignerManuel Raddetook care of the exhibition design withGerald Moser, and of the catalog design withPhilipp Doringer. They choseNaN Displayin Text and Display styles together with the newerNaN Tragedy Display Monofor the scenography, the website and the catalog. The use of pipes and chevrons in the exhibition name seems to insist on its scientific / technical theme. The all-caps titles of the book, with their dynamic left-and-right alignments look like a missed opportunity to align characters between all lines on the rigid grid of the monospaced font. A scanned picture of a book with a photographic picture of an exhibition showing the exhibition's scenography on the further wall in the picture. We need to go deeper.
Scientific rigor meets artistic experimentation through a typography system that embodies quantum physics' indeterminate nature. The combination of NaN Display's technical precision with NaN Tragedy Display Mono's computational aesthetic creates an intellectual energy that feels both laboratory-precise and creatively unpredictable, perfectly capturing the liminal space between hard science and contemporary art.
NaN Display's clean geometric construction provides the clarity needed for scientific discourse while maintaining enough personality to avoid clinical sterility. The addition of NaN Tragedy Display Mono introduces a monospaced rhythm that references coding environments and data visualization, directly connecting to the digital/technological aspects of quantum-inspired art. The optical sizing ensures optimal legibility across the various exhibition touchpoints from wall graphics to catalog text.
The proportional-to-monospace pairing creates a sophisticated hierarchy that mirrors the exhibition's theme of transitioning between different states of reality. NaN Display handles the flowing, interpretive content while NaN Tragedy Display Mono grounds technical information and titles in a rigid computational grid. This typographic duality reflects quantum physics' own paradoxes—the same information existing in multiple states simultaneously.