After 5 millennia, the observe of writing nonetheless serves the enduring human want to speak messages and knowledge from place to position and time to time. Writing programs are encoded with cultural heritages and require preservation. Quasi: Experimental Writing Programs is an exhibition (opening November 16) about invented and imaginary writing programs. “Klingon, Elvish and Kryptonian are standard up to date examples, however they signify solely a fraction of a much wider panorama,” writes curator Lavinia Lascarsis concerning the exhibition she curated at Artwork Heart’s Hoffmitz Milken Heart for Typography. “In contrast to writing programs which have developed organically over generations of collective utilization, the tasks showcased within the exhibition current new configurations of indicators and symbols, meticulously crafted at distinct time limits, every born with intention and goal.”
The urge to craft a writing system is impressed by a wide range of private, social and cultural components. “A couple of examples from an inexhaustible listing of inventive impulses are encoding messages via cryptography, preserving endangered languages,” she continues, “strategies for quicker writing, writing devoid of semantic content material, investigating historic symbolism and its up to date relevance, even channeling otherworldly entities via automated writing.”
This “secret vice” of inventing languages—as J.R.R. Tolkien refers to it—exposes us all to linguistic operations exterior of our on a regular basis expertise and divulges a fascination with otherness the place mythology and utopia are recurring themes.
Lascarsis notes that Quasi has private roots in her life. Across the age of 8, as a response to a loud and energetic dwelling, she designed an encrypted cipher primarily based on the Greek alphabet for writing non-public ideas. A decade later, she developed a “delicate obsession with the tales set in Tolkien’s Center Earth and the fictional languages drawn from his huge backdrop of mythic narratives. One other 10 years on, amidst a profession change, my journey into typography started, revealing its intricate connection to language.” This developed right into a analysis mission that addresses typography, linguistics and fiction.
Quasi views the invention of writing programs as “a speculative course of and an train of discovery to uncover new quasi-realities inside our programs of communication,” she explains. “Taking part in with language and fostering linguistic variety contributes to an ongoing dialog about creativeness and re-worlding, and their potential as rebellious processes to disrupt current energy buildings and reshape our collective narrative.”
The works within the exhibition are rooted on this intersection. Delivered as font design tasks, artwork books, scrolls, drawings, sculptures and different artifacts, some works are deliberately designed to be purposeful writing programs, permitting potential utilization by others, whereas some exist in a realm the place performance turns into completely irrelevant: Calder Ruhl Hansen’s D16 Syllabics is an abugida (syllabary writing system the place consonants have built-in vowels) drawing from Canadian Aboriginal syllabics; Coline Besson’s Arrakis, impressed by Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune, is a sand plate inscribed with a rectilinear interpretation of the Arabic Kufic script; and Sound Clouds and Syllabaries by Ilka Helmig and Johannes Bergerhausen introduces a collection of drawings capturing patterns of exhaled smoke generated throughout vocalization of syllables. Most of the tasks in Quasi stay works-in-progress, mirroring the perpetual evolution of language itself—a fluid entity that lacks a definitive model and adapts in tandem with societal shifts.
