Input Output
In the exhibition Input Output, Mark Meer explores what can happen when you let go of functionality and let the process take its course.
Designer, type designer and artist Mark Meer shows from 28 November 2026 to 10 January 2027 in the ACEC Salon what can happen when you let go of functionality and let the process run its course. Discover his surprising images, shapes and patterns in the exhibition Input Output.
Mark Meer (Tubbergen, 1991) is a designer and artist from Apeldoorn. In daily life, he works as a graphic and type designer. In his work, he searches for the separation between form and functionality. For the boundaries of legibility. How a preconceived rule system can be consistently applied to the alphabet. Over the past year, he has let go of his focus on functionality and applied his working method to various forms. The exhibition Input Output is an overview of experiments and the process towards a new typeface.
Obsessed with form and a fanatical collector. Mark has folders, boxes and cupboards full of catalogues, posters, stickers, packaging material, guides, maps, keychains and action figures. The house is full of chairs that no one can sit on properly. In addition, he records everything that is too big to keep in a cupboard. For years, he has been photographing all the striking things on the street for his personal archive: infrastructure, trucks, front gardens, signage, street furniture and architecture. Shapes that inspire Mark, objects that demand attention. But also details of situations that you quickly walk past. Irregularities in the paving stones on the street, weeds between the tiles, an anthill, crumbling bricks, bird droppings or the markings of a parking space.
Input Output: The process as subject
Mark runs into his own predictability and is often already bored by an idea before it is out of his head. By appropriating the shapes on the street and by focusing less on the result and more on the process, surprising images emerge. Work on which he seems to have little influence, but which is still close to him.
He traces striking features from the photos in his archive onto tracing paper, thus making underlying shapes and patterns visible. What happens to these patterns if you make changes? The arrangement, the weight, the width, framing. By playing with the rules he imposes on himself, the result changes. Producing, copying, printing, tracing, scanning and repeating. In search of the relationship between form and typography.
De Opening – Mark Meer
For the opening of the cultural season in 2025, Apeldoorn was the official host city. Mark Meer created an installation for the Buitenmuseum in the Oranjepark that could only be seen during the weekend of DE OPENING 2025. Now this structure returns to Apeldoorn for one time only as part of the exhibition Input Output.
In this spatial installation for the Buitenmuseum, Mark Meer experiments with the possibilities of a limited system. By arranging simple elements according to a fixed rhythm, a construction is created that tries to capture the space. Through small interventions, the installation is constantly in motion. Elements can be adjusted, shifted or combined differently. This creates a new composition every time, built up from separate parts that together form one whole.
The work shows how structure and freedom can go hand in hand and how our world is sometimes more of a system than we think. Watch along, think along and let yourself be surprised by how rhythm, form and space come together. A game of lines and emptiness, between on and off, between order and interpretation.
