The Olympic City

Presented on April 17, 2013 from 6:00 pm-7:30 pm in the Reinsch-Pierce Family Auditorium on the Georgia Tech campus.Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. He worked with punk label SST Records in the late 1980s, and was subsequently involved in a wide range of projects in music and book publishing before he began producing documentaries in 2001. His films include the design documentaries Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized.Jon Pack is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work has been exhibited in galleries in the US and Europe, and has appeared on book covers from publishers including Simon & Schuster and Random House. His previous projects include the limited-edition book Out There; That Thing We Call Nature.Runtime: 73:56 minutesSince 2008, photographer Jon Pack and filmmaker Gary Hustwit have sought out the successes and failures, remnants and ghosts of the Olympics in cities including Athens, Barcelona, Mexico City, Lake Placid, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Rome. Their photographs document structures, streets, signage, and ephemera as a way of acknowledging and analyzing a complex set of relationships between the past and the present. Pack and Hustwit are creating an archive of imagery which not only illustrates the successes and failures of variations on a legendary sporting event, but their project offers a possible guide to the dos and don’ts of contemporary built environments

Helvetica

A documentary about a typeface? When said typeface is a ubiquitous piece of graphic design, yes. Helvetica--a sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 at the Haas Foundry in Munchenstein, Switzerland--has partisans and detractors, a great number of them graphic designers and theorists, who express their opinions on the famous font. It is seen as neutral and efficient, concise yet inexpressive, purposeful yet not caustic, utilitarian and unembellished, or as frustratingly familiar, perfectly subliminal, or as the typeface of socialism. From storefronts, street signs, product packaging, government forms, and advertisements, it is almost guaranteed that after viewing, you will be scanning the world examining Helvetica's continuing impact