Takeluma

Interactive typography, 2005–2006

Takeluma is an invented writing system for representing speech sounds and the visceral responses they can evoke. Takeluma explores the complex relationships between speech, meaning, and writing. The work examines our basic assumptions about language and looking at connections between sound, writing, and meaning. One of the original assumptions of linguistic theory is that there is no inherent relationship between words and the meanings they represent, that the linguistic sign ‘dog’ could just as well mean cat or vice versa. This work explores this assumption through visible language experiments. The Takeluma project explores these relationships through a series of examples across different media. In these works I am especially interested in what might be considered a synesthetic result: sound and visual tightly coupled, tied together through meaning. These works look at the boundaries and connections between sense and nonsense, between pattern and noise, between text and texture.

The Takeluma project comprises several animated and print works and a reactive installation and was my MFA thesis project at UCLA’s Design and Media Arts department.

typotopo