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 historic 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.