Human Abecedary

The work Human Abecedary is a generative alphabet that takes the standard pool of Latin letters and systematically abstracts them by cutting them up and swapping their parts around. This process reorients familiar components, namely recognisable letters, and mutates them indefinitely to appear ‘foreign’, solely by rearranging them. The work calls to mind fictional languages and asemic writing systems that have no national identity – an algorithmic way to defamiliarise the alphabet from itself. The work runs in five-minute cycles, at the end of which the alphabet resets back to legibility, only to begin mutating again. Because the process of mutation involves chance-based operations, the result is unique every time it runs.