BB Can you tell us a bit about the background of Image, Text, Time? How did you come up with the idea? What brought you together?
FM & WR We wanted to find as many different ways as possible in which artists have dealt with typography as a central and structuring element in moving image works, outside the conventions of motion graphics or film titling. We were not interested in works where text is subservient to the image, but rather in how it becomes the image itself. Related to that we were also interested in the point at which the seemingly separate acts of reading words and viewing moving images might start to break down and become the same thing – in how images might be read, both literally and figuratively. Our research has been quite broad, crossing different timeframes – from the 60s to the present – different cultures of artists’ film – such as video art, experimental / avant-garde cinema – and with that the different technologies that have been used to render both moving images and typography. We came together through an interest in how we might combine our knowledge in the areas of typography, graphic design and artists’ film and video to create a project which offers new ways of approaching and mapping artists’ moving image – one that simultaneously has the capacity to engage both a graphic design and artists' film community.
We’ve screened different instances of the project at venues including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the ICA, London, but it’s ongoing and our selection shifts and changes each time. An important aspect of the project is that we also create a screen-printed poster which brings the different artists together.

BB What is your favourite film that employs typography in a remarkable way and why?
FM Associations by John Smith (1975)
Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by Herbert H. Clark. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. ‘Image and word work together/against each other to destroy / create meaning’ (Smith).
WR Active Poetry by Ewa Partum (1971)
In the early ’70s Polish artist Ewa Partum made a number of public performances and installations which freed language from its use as a tool of political indoctrination and as a means of asserting authority. Shot on 8 mm, this film documents a series of actions in which the artist scatters white letters across the landscape and into the sea, allowing them to create a kind of indeterminate poetry. The cut out letters she distributes in the piece were readily available in Poland at that time and were typically used to make communist banners. The film is at once a film, a performance, a poem and a political act. 

BB How does the project you have prepared for the Off Programme fit into the larger context of your practice? Are you working on something related?
FM&WR We hope to develop it into a bigger research project with a touring exhibition, book and DVD. One idea we’ve been toying with is the idea of creating an index of artists’ moving image works that deploy typography in the ways described above, with the intention of this being equally interesting and useful in the worlds of graphic design and artists' film.