title
Venus
Artist/Designer
Ximena Amaya
Date
2023
type of writing system
Asemic
Based on
Latin script
References
Venus figurines, Geofroy Tory’s Roman alphabet
Geofroy Tory, a French Renaissance typographer and printer, wrote Champ Fleury in 1529, a book exploring the Roman alphabet construction. With his Man of Letters theory, he draws parallels between the Latin letterforms and the male body—similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—with the white, male form as the source of inspiration and truth. In opposition to this example stands the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic artifact of unclear origins, a female figure that exposes biases and projections that inform our understanding of history. Venus—the offspring of these two historical examples—is a set of graphs created using Midjourney by blending images of the Venus of Willendorf with Latin letters. This generative “alphabet,” deprived of semantic content, speculates on what letterforms (and language) could be if not for the Western Eurocentric perspectives that have shaped it, approaching letterforms as anthropological artifacts that reflect the inherent biases concealed within history, language, and technology.
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Artwork courtesy of Ximena Amaya. All rights reserved.
abjad
abugida
acrophony
acrostic
alphabet
alphasyllabary
asemic writing
automatic writing
boustrophedon
character
character set
cipher
code
conscript
cryptography
encode
experimental
grapheme
glyph
hieroglyph
hieroglyphics
imaginarium
language
letter
letterform
linguistic
logosyllabary
logographic
logogram
nat scirpt
neography
optophonetic
phoneme
phonetic
pictograph
quasi
re-worlding
script
syllabary
syllable
symbol
speculative
torus
versimilitude
writing system
