DINGDING / BILLBOARD #3

Commissioned by the Apeldoorn Centre for the Arts; originally designed for the curved facade
of the Art Centre 22.11.06 - 19.12.06. (scroll down to see last photo)
Curator of the series is Jasper van der Graaf.

This photo is taken from new location along the Europaweg, a motorway approaching Apeldoorn,
where the Billboard series are remounted on separate frames. Other billboards were designed by
Guido Winkler, Mischa Rakier, Martijn Sandberg, Arnoud Dijkstra, Maaike Folmer and Ayuk Kuperus.

Above: DINGDING at second location - Europaweg, Apeldoorn 23.06.07 - 30.09.07

Above:: detail of DINGDING. Click on image to see the whole billboard design
PVC canvas, stretched on frame, 400 x 400 cm

DINGDING consists 1292 Wingdings and Webding icons arranged on a 4 x 4 m grid of 36 x 36 squares. The Wingdings fonts were designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow in 1990 and 1991.
Renamed, reorganized and released in 1992 as Microsoft Wingdings ™ the fonts provide a set of icons representing the common components of personal computer systems and elements of graphical user interfaces.

Khouw selected of two groups from the set of pictograms: signs that act as pointers and signs that indicate position. The 'pointer' group is coloured black - they form the nine-letter word 'APPELEPAP' , meaning nonsense or gibberish in Dutch.This work questions our way of seeing while we are confronted with massive amounts of both useful and useless information daily. Are we able to observe each phenomenon separately or do we only see what we already know?