Adam Blatner

Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner

Letter-Forms as Art

Originally posted on July 26, 2013

By no means am I the only one who plays with the root forms of alphabets and the like as potential forms of art. I’ve been seriously interested in what I call “scriptology,” and also playfully interested, insofar as the making of writing is an art form in several cultures. It has become more so in the last several hundred years in the West with the development of typography, and more so beyond that with more prevalent printing and computerized design. There’s a lot that can be done with the A-B-Cs. But I find something hauntingly intriguing about the idea that there might be millions of intelligent life forms in the cosmos    and of those, in the past or present, they, too, some of them, have made writing systems. I fantasize that the figures are like Mayan or Chinese or Egyptian Hieroglyphics. I allow myself to “write,” making up tables of the letters, or pseudo-writing.

I guess it’s like glossolalia—speaking in tongues—only this kind is written. It has some of the freshness of kids who don’t yet know the alphabet but want to play like they can write, with the addition of a bit more muscular control. The forms that come forth please me, most of them. Let ‘em flow.

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Okay, now it’s your turn.


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