Typography

Asemica

Typography exists to honor content. Type is idealized writing, and its normal function is to record idealized speech. Here is a generative algorithm that creates typographic compositions. As traditional asemic writing is to handwriting, Asemica is to typography: it creates asemic writing by the hand of a machine.

Unbeknownst to the viewer at first glance, the work is centered on the artist who was focused on the process of generating the generator. It is abstract. Character forms that look handmade in fact are not.  Slight discomfort forms from this realization for typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time – but here there is none.

The mind’s association with Persian writing that pushed out from the screen was in fact composed from a pool of predefined elements of abstract shapes derived from English-language letters and symbols. Color palettes were compiled from what was not allowed. Structured but restrictive and random.

Typography should be richly and superbly ordinary, so that attention is drawn to the quality of the composition, not to the individual letterforms. And yet here… there is no content, only code-driven aesthetics. Perhaps it is only fitting that their lasting impact is, at least for now, in the eye of the beholder.