ARTWORK

Stories Not Used “בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ / WYC1382”
2024

Mixed media
Dimension variable

The series, titled “Stories Not Used,” focuses on what has fallen out of the various historical narratives and what has drifted around these words but has not been recorded in words.

I started my career as a graphic designer and was heavily influenced by Swiss-style typography. Therefore, I have been thinking about how to make the typeface itself a contemporary work of art, rather than using it as part of a contemporary work of art.

The typeface designs of Nicolas Jenson and Claude Garamond, as well as Giambattista Bodoni, Jan Tschichold, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, are all fruits of the highest human creativity, each based on a specific aesthetic sense and design philosophy. However, only typeface designers can interact with those ideas, and most people are unaware that there is an clear idea behind each typeface.

Also, human communication is a combination of sounds, gestures, and facial expressions, but letters only record sounds. However, most of human histories have been recorded by letters. There must have been a vast amount of information that was lost before it became a written language.

Fortunately, today there are many font editors that allow us to create our own fonts. We also have sophisticated digital recorders, sonograph software, and image editing software. I decided to create a font set using those tools, and from the sounds that surround the clearly audible words, but which have fallen out of the words. This is a metaphor for the fact that there are always unwritten voices around the voices that have been recorded in written form. At the same time, the font set itself has the possibility of becoming a contemporary work of art.

This is the work about what has spilled out of the words used to tell History. Letters on the screen are figures extracted from sonographs of the alphabet read aloud, just before and after the letters are pronounced. Shapes similar to the letters corresponding to the sound are extracted and entered into font editor to create a font set. This set has no kerning and all letters have square margins.”Stories Not Used” is also the name of this font set.

This work uses this set to write out the beginning of the Old Testament Book of Genesis (English translation by Wycliffe), “In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe.”.The Wycliffe translation of the Bible is the first English translation of the entire Old and New Testaments, although it is a multiple translation from the Biblia Sacra Vulgata (a Latin translation of the Bible dating from around 405). The small typefaces “Genesis” and “Wycliffe (1382)” at the bottom of the screen are written in Neue Helvetica from the Helvetica font family, the most widely used font set in the history of mankind. Neue Helvetica was chosen from the most widely used font set in human history, Helvetica. This is a contrast between the heads (Helvetica) and tails (Stories Not Used) of the power law in typefaces.