Studio Spass’ large-scale type installations are inspired by tear-off calendars

Studio Spass has had quite a fascination with offline engagement and physical participation recently. This has led to some experimental spacial design projects like the 35-metre-long playground Baltimore Bend, as well as the wonderful, large-scale typographic installation Bigger. “As our name ‘Spass’ [fun] suggests, we are always looking for fun and playful opportunities within work and projects”, says Jaron Korvinus, co-founder of Studio Spass. Certainly playful, its recent title type grids, are both a wonderfully tactile interruption to everyday environments and an invitation to indulge in a kind of child-like joy (exactly what Studio Spass does best).

The creative studio’s recent installation at the Bigger art book fair in Shenzhen was a real page-turner. Made out of 264 A4 books – with each of their 24 pages cleverly displaying further abstract details – the large-scale work was designed to reveal “new layers of design and custom colour combinations” with each flip of a page. Fitting for an art book fair, the piece was inspired by the act of reading and the slow, physical storytelling that artist books create. Installed to welcome visitors to the fair, Bigger is designed to constantly change over the course of the event and, through user participation, cleverly reveals a hidden message in a bespoke typeface: Enjoy books! 享受书籍.

Studio Spass always strives for simple ideas that are “highly accessible and aim to have visitors interact intuitively”. Jaron says: “We create ‘the potential’ and the framework but it’s the audience that really brings the work alive eventually.” Like any public-facing work, there are varied responses. These include: “children who just go completely crazy, as if it is a physical challenge”, and a few “smart people who take one sheet of every block to be able to replicate a complete layer back home”.

Before they get big, a lot of these installations start out as miniature paper models (which we absolutely love), in order to test out mechanics, materials and techniques. Some of the studio’s ideas come from typographic sketches. In fact, it was a stack of sketches which prompted the idea for their first-ever interactive installation Something, for an exhibition called Do it at the Kunsthal, in Rotterdam. Instead of asking users to turn pages, Something invites them to rip sheets away like a tear-off calendar to create new typographic expressions. The installation’s panelled appearance, that has transferred to so many of Spass’ other projects, was heavily inspired by “the tiled-page printing function of our A4 printer that we used a lot for making full-scale test print for larger posters in the past,” says Jaron.

Keen to tile up more type, and bring more of its work to the public, Studio Spass are hatching new ideas in their playground of a studio. When discussing future projects that require working big, Jaron says the studio is currently working on “the design of a landmark”, so look out for that next – we’re sure it won’t be hard to miss.