Alphabetc.
Occasionally, the breadth of our textual world stuns me. Though we believe as a matter of faith—the body of Christ, the Trinity, and people rising from the dead—that this contemporary world of ours is trending visual, what we sometimes forget is that text (with few exceptions: Braille, moontype) is always visual. As a matter of fact, I believe that visual culture is usually verbal as well, though some parts of that culture more so than others. Think of the Internet. Text doesn’t disappear there; it predominates, and it facilitates the billions of searches we make against that vast repository of words each day.
Yet I still find it remarkable that each of us can now develop a new alphabet atop the frame of our own alphabet in a semi-automatic way. Go to the Alphabet Synthesis Machine—created by Golan Levin, Jonathan Feinberg, and Cassidy Curtis—and create your own alphabet. It will follow the 26-ary form of our alphabet, with majuscule and minuscule forms, but it will be foreign in shape.* Levin, et al., describe their machine as “an online artwork which allows visitors to create and breed personalized ‘nonsense alphabets’—coherent sets of abstract forms which might resemble the plausible writing systems of imaginary civilizations or unfamiliar societies.” (However, all these alphabets are is the Latin alphabets, disguised.)
Geof Huth, "The magic of this text" (4 May 2005)
Here is a brief swatch of text written with one of the alphabets I created tonight. It reminds me that that that is invisible to us is that that sits before us.‡ The magic of this text is that it appears almost real, yet is not real at all, yet (of course) it is as real as any text we ever see.†
alphab&c.
_____
* I find it instructive to note that the symbol these gentlemen use to advertise their product resembles a character from the Chinese alphabet, even to the point of mimicking the brushstrokes of classic Asian calligraphy.
† The typeface above I have named Dilletante, and you can download it here. The other font I created tonight was Serpendial (available here).
‡ Without even trying, I succeeded in using the word “that” three times in a row while adhering to any relevant grammatical rules.
ecr. l’inf.
22 comments:
the shapes of the letters have profound meanings
how does this 'exercise' deal with that or don't the creators care?
Do any of you 'vispos' know of Robert Grave's TREE ALPHABET or the magnificent poem of Paul Blackburn's, The Watchers, that brings the alphabet home?
Fooling around with letters is not a frivilous undertaking.
Words have great power. Everything about them. They are the avatars of self-knowledge. Discussions of the first gods, the bicameral mind, nature as both an alphabet and ritual of language, the five elements, gnosticism, gematria, kabbalah, and the uses of letters, words and images, all of language, to create and destroy the wor(l)d should also be part of the discussion. Letters and words make and unmake the world. We live in the shadows and fires of Set and Ra. It is with the language of physics, fission and fusion, that we were able to steal fire from the gods.
Why do you require a computer program to remind you of the invisible that (sic) "sits before" you?
And more interesting perhaps: can you write a computer program in any language to reveal the invisible that "is" you?
Now that would be useful.
And now I have visited the machine. It is cute enough, but is is NOT an alphabet machine and has almost nothing to do with language.
Let me elaborate bit.
The program is more properly designated a glyph distortion machine. That it must be quasi-transformed into a truetype typeface and mapped onto the latinized alphabet of english and other languages is its primary weakness in terms of generating anything new re language.
No matter what glyph one begins with, it is reembedded in the script of a language that already has a syntax and grammar and a very beautiful and mysterious set of glyphs of its own.
So what is new or intersting here?
Why is it not an alphabet machine?
Because it begins with a single seed glyph.
No alphabet that belongs to a language evolved this way.
And to be clear what I mean by "reembedded": You do type the 'nonsense' alphabet on a keyboard that has latin letters and a shift key. This would appear to give the lie to the claim that the alphabet might represent the language of some other than us beings.
Additonally, there is nothing 'coherent' about these glyphs other than they can be back calculated to the orignal 'seed'.
Obviously agitated, I continue.
The genetic code and the I Ching are transformation systems that initiate with a set of 4 elements.
No alphabet even remotely resembles this type of dynamical generator.
If deep peering at the surface allows the layers to peel to reveal hidden beauty and truth, as in the work of Jim Rosenberg, the palim-set-ic text gains a 21st rebirth that is worth celebrating.
This stuff is diversion, nothing more. Sorry.
Geof,
Ever read any of Armand Schwerner's "Tablets"?
I somehow think not. You really do want to.
Harvey,
I'm more than familiar with Armand Schwerner's "Tablets" (and other works) and even corresponded with him years ago. For one of the times I've written about him (albeit always in passing), see here: http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2005/03/remnants-of-20th-century-american.html
Your requirements for my discussion are interesting but don't lead anywhere for me. All fonts for our computerized use are keyed to our keyboard. This assigns a spot, but not a meaning, to those characters. The folks at the machine don't really mean that these are alien alphabets, of course; they understand what's going on.
The fact that the alphabet generator uses a seedglyph doesn't in any way minimize its alphabet status. There's no need for alphabets to develop in the same manner.
Finally (skipping around), all meaning is unnatural. No meaning necessarily adheres to a shape or a sound; it is cultural acceptance that allows meaningless shapes and sounds to become meaningful. An important point to remember. Words (and letters and sounds) still have amazing power, but we have created that power.
Geof
Geof,
Glad that you know and appreciate Armand's great work and that you had the priviledge to correspond with him.
I will argue with you until the cows come home about the generation of alphabets. Unless they are related to a structure/language they have no meaning at all...of any kind...even when we assign arbitrary or not meaning we must do it in the context of a language construction. And the fundamental rule by which a system is generated defines it better than anything else. Alphabets do not come about this way...to call a scipted set of glyphs an alphabet is to invest it with signifcant power and meaning. The machine doen't do that and neither can you take its creations and simply say that they do.
I cannot see how you can think these nonalphabet but script creators have done anything other than (re)invent a chimpanzee art machine that might have interest as a conceptual tool for creating deeply coded and very personal secret 'alphabets' that could be used to write texts that would only be decipherable by yourself and anyone else you gave the key/code to.
Your stuff re 'relational/cultural meaning' is incomprehensible to me. Maybe you have studied 'social sciences' where they talk like that.
And who, white man is the 'WE' with all the power?
Geof,
BTW as they type, you might try running by your contention ('worth remebering' one too) that sounds have no meaning/power of their own by some Tibetan monks and listen to what they say when they stop smiling.
As for meaningless 'shapes'....well really.
And to bring me (us) back to where my entire foray into poetry-bllog discussion threads began:
I ask you Jack Spicer's question:
If moon were speled mune would it induce madness?
and another 2 q's along the same lines /
can you name
one natural human language in which 'mma' does not mean mother?
is the Om in hOMe culturally relative?
Sorry to change the subject, but I wonder whether modern Western languages ARE visual. Or: I distinguish the cerebrally pre-visual from the visual.
It's possible they are not auditory, either, but VERBAL. By the above reasoning.
You heard it here first. And I'm not being intentionally and trivially paradoxical.
--Bob G.
P.S., I couldn't recite the alphabet correctly until I was ten-years-old, which I think (and hope)is late. I could count correctly by the normal age, I'm pretty sure.
Harvey,
The word mother in Finnish is "äiti." In most languages I know, an m is usually presents, or sometimes an n, but there are exceptions.
Geof
Bob,
Hmm, I don't quite get you. Standard language is, of course, verbal; visual text is merely a representation of language. But I'm sure I'm missing your point!
Geof
an exception that proves the rule?
i think the key word is most (my style over many years in classrooms is to provoke actual answers often by insisting on absolutes when there are indeed a few exceptions)
my only point obviously is that insisting on relativistic determinations about meaning leaves too many nets uncast
as someone who is to tuned to the implicit meanings of the shapes of words, i am still at a loss to understand your remarks.
but finally...so what...it is the work that speaks and our speaking abt it is really as gurdjieff wrote only 'so much pouring from the empty into the void'.
and why not?
geof,
have a look at the url below to see a superb poem by robert kelly (from the Mill of Particulars) that asks all the right questions
http://bialystocker.net/posts/1113212478.shtml
buen dia geof
the alphabetic discussion of yesterday continued en sueno ::
i can make my position no more clear than this:
the machine creates a set of related (very simply) glyphs
anyone may use these to create an alphabet by assigning meanings to each of the glyphs (either the keyboard mappings of the program or some further transformation) and creating or co-opting a grammar and syntax.
indeed, you make the alphabet, NOT the machine.
without the mapping assignments and grammar the only thing you have made is a more or less pleasing to the eye imitation of calligraphic art ... a tradition that is not advanced by the advanced turing machines of the 21st c., at least as far as i have seen.
whether the signs of any alphabet have signification independent of cultural and genetic herstories is one of the intense 'thought provoking questions' of prof. heidegger, and most certainly is not a matter of bald contention.
as an artist, however, i cannot believe you really hold your relativistic postion with any inner conviction.
i go on and on abt this because every single obra in my gallery is based on an alphabetic calculus that is absolutely non-relativistic, and all the pieces (mine and other's) are informed by the deepest sense of mystery and magick, both timeless and relative to nothing.
theory is fine if you can put it to use...after the fact it is a big waste of time.
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