Nerd-Thrill, Continued

("FRAGMENT," Conte crayon on paper, my work from the 90's)

A whole cyber universe of people doing beautiful and stimulating things with type and written communication has come my way through the Omniglot.com website and my travels from link to link. For instance, this one: Elephant's Memory, An Interactive Visual Language "The Elephant's Memory is a pictorial language consisting of more than a hundred and a fifty combinable graphic elements (pictograms and ideograms)." Okay, that doesn't sound that sexy, but take a look, the concept is interesting.

The site that really buzzed me was this: The Alphabet Synthesis, which has a little engine that generates an entire abstract font from your mark. You can then download the fonts and use them on your very own computer machine. But what really struck me was this statement (I believe this is from Golan Levin, one of the creators of this site):

I very clearly remember the first time that I encountered an unfamiliar alphabet: it was an event which occurred in my family's synagogue when I was very small, perhaps four years old. I had just learned to read English, but it had not yet been explained to me that there could exist other writing systems apart from the one I knew. One evening during a ceremony, I asked my father what the funny black squiggles were in the prayer books we were holding. "Sh!" he said: "that is how we talk with God." Astonished, I became transfixed by the black squiggles, which no longer seemed quite so funny; but although I stared at them until I was dizzy, I could find no way to render them intelligible. Only later did I learn that these marks were Hebrew. Since that time, I have been preoccupied by the possibility that abstract forms can connect us to a reality beyond language, and bridge the thin line between nonsense and the divine.

Somewhere between the visual noise of television static, and the visual order of the text you are now reading, lies a fascinating realm of visual semi-sense. Precisely where do the borders of that realm lie? By studying that realm of semi-sense, we surmise that we may come to a deeper understanding of precisely how sense-making occurs at all. To do this, we have written software which attempts to generate artifacts that seem to make sense, but in fact, don't.

I've been trying to put that into words for years...