words | . . . | things

2019

2019

2019

‘Esperantujo, the land of the hopeful’, published in Migrant Journal Issue Number 6 - ‘Foreign Agents’, June 2019.

2019

: revealing radical language practice through traces of temporary ownership

2019

Published in, Cawood, I. and Peters, L. (eds.) ‘Print, politics and the press in provincial Britain’. Peter Lang Publishing

2018

Perhaps this can not be anything

Designed words have a ubiquitous presence in contemporary life: enveloping us, fostering expectations and relationships and shaping many of the contexts through which we live and work. Typography’s role in mediating between a text’s appearance and its meaning is tied largely to those functions of Graphic Design which seek to visually communicate messages and ideas in response to a problem or challenge defined by a particular need. The invention and practice of new languages has also been marked by a desire to reflect upon language’s social function, and the development of Esperanto in 1887 was determined by an explicit need which its creator sought to address: linguistic diversity creates division and a neutral, universal language would solve those problems associated with non-communication, hopefully building a more cohesive and fairer world as a consequence.  

Esperanto, perhaps the most widely-known invented language, arrived in the UK in 1902 via the otherwise unremarkable West Yorkshire town of Keighley where a small community of speakers quickly formed. Notable as the first such community in England, the Keighley Esperanto Society regularly met until the late 1990s when its membership seemingly dwindled to a point of unsustainability.  

Linguistic innovation such as Esperanto is the material impulse of a widely-held Utopian drive and, for its inventor Ludwig Zamenof, the main problem of language was a problem with languages: there were too many and linguistic diversity leads to mistranslation, mistake and misunderstanding. So, for Zamenhof, an artificial and universal auxiliary language would fix the problems of translation - sweeping away any consequences of human error or of non-necessary re-processing of people’s words in order to be properly understood.  

This exhibition presents a selection of critically-informed, practice-led typographic research which explores the material traces of linguistic invention as a means to examine the disruptive and transformative possibilities of translation as a distinct ‘designerly’ activity. The emerging discipline of critical design offers a useful method through which new approaches to a practice of typography can be explored and the work included here looks at ways that ideas of translation can be exercised through automatic or machine-derived methods which seek to embrace the inherent mistakes, errors or unintended consequences of these approaches. 

Paul Wilson. Keighley, October 2018  

Shown as part of the ‘I shout for The Fall’ exhibition, Bury Art Gallery 2018

Exhibition at the APT Gallery, Deptford UK

September 2018

An excerpt from the Esperanto Association of Great Britain Update Number 20 for February / March 2003:

“Muriel Shackleton from Bradford writes:

On Saturday 9th November 2002, Keighley Esperanto Society and the Yorkshire Federation celebrated 100 years of Esperanto in Keighley, where the first Esperanto Group in England was formed by Joseph Rhodes.

Dr. Ian Dewhirst, a well-known local historian, unveiled a bust of Zamenhof, carved by Keighley member Eric Buckley. This is now in Keighley Library alongside the memorial to Joseph Rhodes. Dr. Dewhirst also gave a short after-dinner speech on Keighley and the formation of the Esperanto Society 100 years ago.

A celebratory cake was cut by the president of the Keighley Group, Audrey Duerden, the president of the Yorkshire Federation, Brian O'Sullivan, and Dr. Dewhirst, guest speaker.

Graham Blakey was present, representing Esperanto Association of Britain and it was heart warming to see individual members who had taken the trouble to travel from Cumbria, Wales, Lancashire and Cheshire and from the northern and southern limits of Yorkshire to support this event.”

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The work included in the More in Common exhibition covers a series of typographic narratives produced in response to an idea (the Utopian promise of an auxiliary international language), and its concrete manifestations: both the community of the Esperanto society which was formed in Keighley in 1902 and two books, objects that are still held within the town’s Reference Library.  

Ideas of translation, transcription, interpretation and instrumentalisation are key to the work’s approach and, in terms of typography and visible language, they form the basis of systems and processes which underpin its production. 

2018

2018

The English-Esperanto dictionary In Keighley Reference Library is the source of two types of text - an introductory essay by Rhodes which was, in part, a manifesto for Esperanto as a tool through which one version of linguistic utopia might be reached. He goes on to extol the virtues of Esperanto and spends time arguing for the practical functions of a dictionary - and that Esperanto’s potential successes might depend quite heavily on maintaining the dictionary as both portable and user-friendly. Alongside this is, obviously, the dictionary’s content - those words and their translations which formed the basis of this ur-text for Esperanto’s entry into the English-speaking world.

The reference copy in Keighley Library was donated by Rhodes’ widow and belonged to one of his small circle of friends - it is quite heavily annotated and features some corrections and suggestions for future additions - a working document, allowing a glimpse of the language-in-development. The work takes the first instance of each letter as the basis of the construction of an alphabetical list that is subject to the visual constraints of layout and formatting typical to the genre of document that it belongs to. 

2018

The ‘Browne Issue System’ was invented by American archivist and librarian Nina Brown (1860-1954) and was an experiment in efficiently managing the circulation of knowledge through a use of printed cards and, like Esperanto, was founded upon an ideal of cooperation. Fundamental to the development of the systematisation of the idea of a library, the Browne Issue System was reliant on an ephemera of association and, significantly, the documentation and delineation of a reader’s period of temporary ownership. This once-familiar system of small cards (one belonging to a reader and the other to a book) being kept together for the duration of a book’s loan was in use for over 100 years before being superseded by new technologies and now seems very much a relic. Lists of dates produced by Brown’s system are generated in response to everyday human interactions, between individuals and institutions and as the book makes its way around and through the local readership(s). 

The work used visual methods to develop typographic narratives around the objects of the books themselves: describing them in as straightforward way as possible, mining them and revealing tangible information together with the production of an ‘it’ narrative aimed to explore an idea of collaboration, imagining those objects with some notion of agency and of having a voice which allows for a description of ‘experiences’ both within and outside of the Library.

2018

The figure of Joseph Rhodes looms over any interactions with the books held in Keighley Reference Library or any enquiry into the Keighley Esperanto Society - he was responsible for compiling the first English to Esperanto dictionary and for founding the society.

He also played a key role in another association of individuals seeking to find other, more radical uses for language and in the production of another publication. In this case, he aimed to extend communication’s potential from the everyday and those relationships that can be founded and sustained through ideas of good neighbourliness towards a more spectral realm. The mother church of British Spiritualism is situated a short walk from the Library and Rhodes was an active member of it after it arrived in Keighley in 1853 (the church being founded on its current site in 1895). 

Bringing together ideas of conceptual writing and linguistic and typographic production the work attempts to locate a sense of voice for one of the key participants in the stories of utopian linguistic invention within Keighley. These activities resulted in a first-person text (produced as a series of smaller sets of writing) seemingly dictated by the spirit of Rhodes himself. These words were documented as part of their production (see ‘I am the Compiler’) and then transcribed.

Using an alphabet derived from the first entry of each letter in the Library's English-Esperanto dictionary, the texts are re-presented as a series of constrained typographic experiments, whose layout was confined to a strict 16x16 column grid (16 being the number of grammatical rules underpinning Esperanto). Edits were then performed upon the Compiler's words, with new meanings emerging from the rearrangement of fragmented units or via an overlay of letterforms and consequent juxtaposition.  Here, an attempt is made to communicate the entirety of a text while introducing another nonhuman actant and associated algorithmic energies in a documentary role with some impact upon the text's presentation. From the shadows of the foregrounded writing emerge glimpses of Rhodes' other words - the relative straightforwardness of the visible language emphasises a stern turn of phrase and a keenness to call attention to his authority ('These shabby words no longer exist. I am the Compiler’). 

2017-2018

2017-2018

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2016

2016

2016

2015

Shown as part of the ‘Lorem Ipsum’ exhibition, curated by Louise Atkinson at The Tetley, Leeds.

2015-2019

2016-2017

2010