300 Alphabets, One Moving Image — Inside Polyglot

The premise of Polyglot is simple to state and difficult to execute: what does it look like when the world's writing systems move through each other continuously?

Not translated. Not compared. Moving through each other — each script maintaining its own internal logic while entering into visual relationship with every other.

The Source Material

Polyglot draws on more than 300 writing systems: living scripts, historical scripts, scripts with tens of millions of speakers and scripts with fewer than a hundred. The alphabetic, the syllabic, the logographic. Scripts that read left to right, right to left, top to bottom.

Each script has its own spatial logic. Part of what Polyglot does is make those spatial logics visible through contrast and juxtaposition.

The Technical Approach

The generative system builds a continuous field of script — no fixed frame, no beginning or end — through which the camera moves slowly. The sense of the whole is never available. Only the local, the immediate, the passage of particular forms.

Available as a video work on Sedition. Archival prints available through the website.