Asemic
2023. Generative drawing, P5js
A sentence encrypted as generated glyphs. Illegible, and decipherable by anyone who works out the substitutions.
- Research line
- L2
Each letter of the source text is replaced by a glyph generated randomly as a small connected Hamiltonian path, a line that visits every point of a figure exactly once. The substitution is consistent, so this is a cipher and not an ornament: anyone who compares repeated forms can recover the alphabet and read it. Until then the work divides its readers in two, which is the condition it describes. The sentence it holds is Wittgenstein's, and its subject is language.
Extended text
A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.
The sentence inscribed in the work. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations / Philosophische Untersuchungen, English translation by G. E. M. Anscombe, 1953.