Paul Elliman

Paul Elliman (born 1961) is a British artist and designer based in London. His work combines an interest in typography and the human voice, often referring to forms of audio signage that mediate a relationship between them. His typeface Found Fount (aka Bits) is an ongoing collection of found ‘typography’ drawn from objects and industrial debris in which no letter-form is repeated.^{[citation needed]}

Paul Elliman

Elliman's work explores the instrumentalisation of the human voice as a form of typography, engaging the voice in many of its social and technological guises, imitating other languages and the random sounds of the city. This includes the non-verbal messages conveyed by emergency vehicle sirens, radio transmissions and the muted acoustics of architectural spaces.^{[citation needed]}

He has exhibited in the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tate Modern^[1] in London, the New Museum and Moma (Ecstatic Alphabets, 2012) in New York,^[2] APAP in Anyang, South Korea,^[3] and Kunsthalle Basel. In 2009, his project "Sirens Taken for Wonders" was commissioned for the New York biennial Performa09.^[4] The project took the form of a radio discussion about the coded language of emergency vehicle sirens, as well as a series of siren-walks through the city.

In 2010, he contributed a series of whistled versions of bird song transcriptions by Olivier Messiaen for the show We Were Exuberant and Still Had Hope, at Marres Centre for Contemporary Art, Maastricht.^[5]

Elliman is a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art,^[6] New Haven, and a thesis supervisor at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands.