quasi: experimental writing systems more+




With a history spanning more than five millennia, the practice of writing serves as a testament to the enduring human impulse to record, preserve, and transmit information across time and space. Writing systems—sets of standardized symbols and rules used to convey language visually—can carry within them a culture’s history, traditions, and collective knowledge, making them powerful vessels of cultural preservation and expression. Quasi: Experimental Writing Systems explores the craft of inventing and designing writing systems that—unlike those that have evolved organically over generations of collective usage—were meticulously created at distinct points in time with intention and purpose.

The projects in the exhibition present atypical configurations of signs and symbols inspired by science fiction, cryptography, modern technology, language preservation, sound, nature, and communication with the dead. Some works are designed to be functional writing systems, allowing potential usage by others, while some exist in a realm where functionality becomes entirely irrelevant. Furthermore, many remain works-in-progress, mirroring the perpetual evolution of language itself—a fluid entity that lacks a definitive version and adapts in tandem with societal shifts.

At the intersection of typography, linguistics, and fiction, the exhibition approaches the invention of writing systems as a speculative process and an exercise to discover new quasi-realities within our systems of communication. This practice reveals a fascination with otherness where mythology and utopia are recurring themes. Through this exploration, Quasi contributes to an ongoing dialog about language to foster linguistic diversity that can reshape our collective narrative.

LATIN
HEBREW
HANGUL
KLINGON
KRYPTONIAN
TENGWAR
HIGH VALYRIAN
MAYAN
LINEAR ELAMITE
ARABIC
GREEK
SYLLABICS
HIEROLYPHICS
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
Mark
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