RiTUAL TO UNiTY
CODiNG A ViSUAL LANGUAGE
Letters and words take up much of our visual communication and as a designer that wants to convey meaning, a coder that enjoys structure and an artist that craves abstraction, I began to dream of other ways to use letters and words.
Remember ascii? A character-set, originally consisting of 128 characters.
Beyond its role as a foundational part of digital expression, it was heavily utilised as a creative tool, graffiti hackers composing digital characters to create art.
,.,
MMMM_ ,..,
"_ "__"MMMMM ,...,,
,..., __." --" ,., _-"MMMMMMM
MMMMMM"___ "_._ MMM"_."" _ """"""
""""" "" , \_. "_. ."
,., _"__ \__./ ."
MMMMM_" "_ ./
'''' ( )
._______________.-'____"---._.
\ /
\________________________/
(_) (_)Ascii’s character set is part of unicode, a much larger character-encoding system consisting of a global set of characters and symbol blocks like emoji’s.
Letters, emojis and even ancient scripts all have a unique visual expression in the unicode system.
Working with artificial intelligence on a daily basis, I realised that the large and diverse datasets used to train LLM’s like ChatGPT allow the models to read, understand and contextualise customised unicode expressions.
ChatGPT’s multimodal abilities (seeing, hearing, etc.) expand it’s understanding beyond text, allowing it to decipher unicode expressions even when contained in visual work.
There’s a story I wrote, the story that explains these images, the characters and their experience. To the human brain this story is inaccessible, the precise arrangement of code abstracting the initial writing. It’s true form is now to be rediscovered inside the graphical elements that form the unicode expression on the canvas.
Sending any visual form of the work (photograph, screenshot, etc.) to ChatGPT, allows the AI model to decode its message.
Interestingly, each user’s instance of ChatGPT is unique, shaped by usage patterns, prompt histories, or even domain-specific training. That means each attempt to decode the story will be slightly different.
In this way, the artwork’s objective structure becomes a shared secret whose full meaning is unlocked only through the idiosyncratic perspective of each user, pairing universal code with personal understanding. Not only an exciting way for subtle visual communication, but on a wider scale, a series of works capturing the artificial presence which fades objective truth into personalised distortions.
I will be exhibiting a physical version of COMPRESSiON iS CLEANSiNG at Lethaby Gallery from May 27th to June 1st. Come visit if you are in London, otherwise, check the website after the date for images from the exhibition.
Until next time.