→ books & braille: reading with the fingertips

↓ 

At BABE earlier this year I met a Norwegian artist Randi Strand. Randi's work reflects on the physicality and meaning of language signs, exploring relationship between signifier and signified. Randi showed me her recent book BERØRINGSSTROFER, which runs a Norwegian text alongside a text in Braille. Norwegian words are printed in a gently raised glossy ink. A bind person would be able to read the Braille and detect the physical presence of another text without being able to read it. A sighted person, on the other hand, will be able to read the Norwegian text (subject to the knowledge of Norwegian!) and see the presence of Braille as asemic writing. This beautifully light and poetic book combines tactile and visual pleasure of reading.

↓

When we close our eyes, the object between our fingers loses visual cues - such as title, text, colophon, index, images. Books become blank books - or libri illeggibile - books devoid of traditional attributes of book in favour of acoustic and tactile experience. (Reading Book as an Object, 2015)

Indeed, some books become less blank than the others: some books are produced for tactile reading and they can only be read with the fingertips. In those books materiality of the object merges with the verbal and the visual content into one tactile experience of a very physical reading. They are the books for the blind.

↓ 

David Rumsay Map Collection holds a 1837 embossed atlas for the blind. The atlas is printed in Boston Line Type - it was not until 20th century that New England Institution for Education of the Blind adopted Braille. 

L: Back of embossed New Hampshire map page. R: Explanation of New Hampshire map. From atlas of the united states, Printed for the use of the blind, at the expense of John C. Cray; under the direction of s.g. howe. at the n.e. institution for the education of the blind. Boston 1837.(SLATE)

L: Back of page holding explanation of Vermont map. R:New Hampshire map. From atlas of the united states, Printed for the use of the blind, at the expense of John C. Cray; under the direction of s.g. howe. at the n.e. institution for the education of the blind. Boston 1837. (SLATE)

↓ 

Contemporary embossed maps are produced by Princeton Braillists. The master drawings are duplicated by the Thermoform process to make clear, sharp copies onto plastic sheets, which are bound into volumes with cardboard covers and spiral plastic binders.

from OUTLINE MAPS OF THE WORLD

from ATLAS OF NORTHERN AFRICA

from BASIC HUMAN ANATOMY

↓

A few years ago Illinois Rare Books and Manuscripts library found a 19th century Moon's "First illustrated reader": a book for blind children, published in Moon type and decorated with eight embossed illustrations.

Bellow is a beautiful contemporary Braille edition of Piccolo Principe, with embossed illustrations, including this image of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.

↓

A very promising appliance for the blind was featured in September 2015 issue of BBC Focus Magazine. BLITAB - a tablet which will allow the 285 million of blind and visually impaired individuals to finally enter the "tablet revolution". BLITAB is the first affordable (potentially) and light tablet for the blind. It was developed by an Australian startup: it creates Braille out of tiny, liquid-filled bubbles. Up to 15 lines of Braille can be displayed, while built-in software can convert text into Braille from websites or USB sticks. BLITAB can also display graphs, pictures, maps. It is expected to go on sale in 2016.

 ↓

The final body of images come from a photographic work by the above mentioned Norwegian artist Randi Strand. Her series Memoria feature a set of seemingly insignificant images overprinted with Braille, forming a drawing of embossed writing.

The works are at the same time images of language and inaccessible language images. They conceal their message and convert communication into decoration. One language decorates another. She complicates them, takes them apart and reassembles them in new ways. She challenges us to ignore the meaning of signs and draws our attention to the signs as such, in other words, to the visuality of language – as form, movement, image. In this way the signs are emptied of their original meanings, without becoming meaningless in the process. (text by Mari Aarre)

 [post by Egidija]

→ illegible writing (almost)/ #asemic

Some time ago I had a pleasure to see Bruno Munari's libre Illegible at Estorick Collection in London. Libre illegible contained no texts, titles or tables of content. Instead, they could only be "read" as a tactile, acoustic and visual experience. Libre illegible later became one of the key sources of inspiration for our project between one hand and another. Investigation into those illegible books has led me to uncover a world of non-textual "reading" and "writing" - visually beautiful illegible and almost-illegible pieces produced by writers, scientists, poets, artists, spies, adventurers and scribblers of all sorts: some - as a philosophical artistic investigation; some - as communication; others - as encrypted communication.

↓  philosophical artistic investigation

Bruno Munari. Scrittura Illeggibile di un Popolo Sconosciuto

Bruno Munari himself had produced a series of works titled Scritture illeggibili di popoli sconosciuti (Illegible Writings of Unknown People), using asemic writing, based on Arabic and Chinese characters. Asemic writing implies presence of written communication. However, due to it's a-semic nature, interpretation relies on the implications drawn from visual information.

Cecil Touchon, Palimpsest Asemic Correspondence 

Cy Twombly, Letter of Resignation

Mirtha Dermisache, Diario Noº 1 Año 1

Cui Fei, Manuscript of Nature V

Donna Maria de Creeft, Asemic Journal

Guy Beinin, So is the one (a visual poem)* 

Asemic script suggests presence of written communication. It relies on apophenia - a human tendency to see meaningful patterns where they do not exist.Of course, asemic witting is created by people who have experience of reading and writing texts in their native languages - it is based on the knowledge of what a legible written communication looks like. As a result, any asemic language can only exist as a conscious reduction of that experience and unconscious imitation of the languages the writer does not understand - which probably explains, why much of European asemic writing looks like Arabic or Asian scripts.

↓  communication

This is not really an example of illegible writing, rather it is an example of visually beautiful writing practice from the 19th century, when it was a custom to cross-write letters in order to save paper. It look only little experience, they say, to read and write successfully in this way, learning to ignore the overlapping text.

Jane Austen

Charles Darwin

Another 19th century example is a translation. It is produced by an Alaskan Eskimo shaman, who having converted to Christianity attempted to translate the Bible into his tribe’s native script. Biblical names are in English/Latin script -  as there was no equivalent. This page appears to be from Genesis 19, about the two angels who visited Lot, before Sodom and Gomorrah were destructed (currently at Basel Paper Mill, Museum for Paper, Writing and Printing).

 

↓  encrypted communication

 The most famous example of yet unresolved encrypted writing is Voynych Manuscript, of course. It is generally agreed that the manuscript is written in an unknown writing system. As speculations on the nature and the source of the text multiply, the manuscript remains undeciphered. It remains illegible, or - an example of a beautiful asemic writing.

Voynich manuscript

A rather better story lies behind The Copiale Cipher - a mysterious 18th century document that no one could read until 2011. The Copiale Cipher describes the rituals and some of the political ideals of a German secret society in the 1730s. Bellow is an interesting extract about one of the rituals involving reading.

The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank. The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles. The master starts plucking hairs from the candidate’s eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are “symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning,” the master assures the candidate. The candidate places his hand on the master’s amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another. This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the members say. Now you can see.

The Copiale Cipher

Every language is an example of encrypted communication: the message only makes sense to those who have the keys to decoding, those being vocabulary and grammar. Until we have the keys, the writing remains asemic to the individual reader: writing remains a drawing with a potential to be decoded.

Such as this Japanese calligraphy is to me.

Japanese poem by Lady Murasaki Shikibu from Ogura (early 13th century) 

めぐりあひて　見しやそれとも　わかぬ間に　雲がくれにし　夜半の月かげ

 "Meeting on the path:

But I cannot clearly know If it was he,

 Because the midnight moon

In a cloud had disappeared." 

(calligraphy by yopiko)

[Egidija]