Due to its proximrty to thought language has a ten-dercy to te invisible. is easy to interact with bngLKJQ8 passively, mistaking it as a rr'Bdium of transmitting ideas and not as a force in forming them. But lan-guage is neither perfect nor neutral. It possesses a subjective character of its own. Out of this character. contradictions and bioses arise.

The intention of this work is to toke on inquisitive look at language. and to apply the unique prop-erties of the system to the system itself. Subjecting language to its own idiosyncrasies and inconsis-tencies in iteration after iteration in turn brings about major changes and remarkable patterns. It follows that what I hove to soy about words is sometimes best expressed with colors. shapes. or patterns . Putting these thoughts bock into words presents a strange and challenging reversal.

This study of language arrives at more questions than conclusions. Are words adequate? Is lan-guage logical? Is logic adequate? My focus on the flows or glitches in language is not in the spirit of criticism. 19ut in the interest of cultivating a new ideo of possibility or perfection.

The individual letter is easily overlooked in favor of what is built from it-words, sentences, and the ideas expressed with them. Reading does not demand that we look at the letters one at a time or consider them formally. Working in a sign shop, for three years I drew, arranged, and pointed letters, constructing them slowly out of lines, curves, outlines, highlights, shadows, and spaces. Hoving this intimate experience with individual letter-forms gave me on animated understanding of each, as if every letter possessed its own personality and logic. These pieces ore on exaggeration of the slowness of hand-drawing letters. Tak-ing several weeks to draw, each one is a meditation on the form of a single letter on its own, isolated from meaning or context.

These specific letters ore inspired by a German alphabet designed by Paulus Franck in 1601 . In the tradition of illuminat-ed manuscripts, such on ornamental font treats each letter both as on object of worship and as a means of expressing worship towards what is written. But as much as these pieces ore ebroton of the indMduolletters, they ore also on expression of the ideo that celebration-in this case, through embellishment-con lead to obliteration. They ore meant to teeter on the edge of decipherability, oscillating between legibility and abstraction.

It is unlikely that any of us spends a day without seeing letters. Probably, from where you are sitting right now, thousands of letters are easily within view Whether you read them or not. they ore there, repeated over and over in endless permutations.

The distribution of letter recurrence is not equal for all letters. Some letters and sequences of letters (such as •th· or ·ing·) appear more frequently than others-in some cases hundreds of times more than their counterparts. Based on cryptography statistics used for frequency analysis. the letter e. in English, is used approximately 1.251 times for every nine z's. This hierarchy of quantity becomes visible when a text is sorted or alphabetized. Arranged this way, there is no choice but to confront the idea that every piece of writing, no matter its weight, is nothing more than a collection of letters.

The letters of the Latin alpha-bet ore not illustrations of their sounds. Though they may hove evolved from more rep-resentational symbols such as pictogroms, their current forms ore complete abstractions with arbitrary relationships to what they signify. In alternative ways of representing the some alphabet (such as Braille, Morse code, or semaphore flog signals), the sym-bols appear even further abstracted and mysterious. Used under circumstances where pen on paper will not do, the letters ore translated into simple shapes, sounds, and gestures. The meanings of these forms ore not apparent to the untrained eye, but they ore no more abstract, only less famil-iar, than the A-Z alphabet they represent.

Try this: Repeat a word over and over out loud until you con no longer be sure you ore saying it correctly. Notice how. when isolated and repeated, the word seems formless and totally dissociated from any meaning.

With the exception of onomatopoeia, the sounds of words do not resemble their meanings, nor do the shapes of letters resemble their sounds. Because they ore not representational, words and letters signify by virtue of by being distinct from one another. In Eye Exam I and Eye Exam IV the homogeny of the symbols renders the test impotent. Unable to distinguish themselves from one another, the letters ore pure shapes, meaningless and redundant rather than specific.

While most words specify, blah is all things. anything, nothing. Uke a wild cord, it tokes the place of more ·meaningful· words. garnering meaning from its sur-roundings or its physical appearance. In its conspicuous lock of substance. blah is the consummate formless word: a blank slate or, like all words and letters. a vessel for meaning without any meaning in and of itself.

For the purpose of representing far more than twenty-six sounds in the English language, there exist only twenty-six letters Many letters-vowels in particular-live a double or triple life, signifying several possible sounds (phones) with a sin-gle symbol Take, for example, the different sounds represented by an a depending on its context. In the words and, ale, and a//, the letter a is pronounced different-ly despite remaining unchanged in appearance. The three shapes in the piece And, Ale, All represent the three different pronunciations of the letter and suggest a one-to-one phonetic relationship between symbol and sound

••••• Furthermore, there is nothing about the letter a as a form that suggests any of the sounds made when the letter is spoken.lt is symbolic of its sounds only by means of a consensus-a correlation between symbol and sound that we have been taught and take for granted.

The non-phonetic nature of our written language poses a foreseeable difficulty for those learning English. Decoding written words into spoken ones using proper pronunciation depends on memorization rather than straightforward logic. In 1867, Alexander Melville Bell (father of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone) devised a more ·rational· alphabet for the purpose of

teaching speech to the deaf. Bell's alphabet, ·Visible Speech: consists of 122 symbols, each representing a single sound The symbols themselves are loose representations of the various mouth positions that create each sound. In this schema, the characters of the alphabet operate almost as instructions for how to form their corresponding sounds.

·visible Speech· stands in low esteem in the deaf community. The stringent focus on proper articulation, the spirit of which aimed to ·normalize· the deaf, placed conceptual and abstract thought development on the

back burner and created a major setback in deaf education. That both Bells were married to women deaf or hard of hearing presents an added element of irony to their respective inventions. Though perhaps a failure with regard to its intended purpose, the 'Visible Speech" alphabet does point out some shortcomings of the Latin alphabet by proposing a more direct

relationship.