Background
I very clearly remember the first time that I encountered an unfamiliar alphabet: it was an event which occurred in my family's synagogue when I was very small, perhaps four years old. I had just learned to read English, but it had not yet been explained to me that there could exist other writing systems apart from the one I knew. One evening during a ceremony, I asked my father what the funny black squiggles were in the prayer books we were holding. "Sh!" he said: "that is how we talk with God." Astonished, I became transfixed by the black squiggles, which no longer seemed quite so funny; but although I stared at them until I was dizzy, I could find no way to render them intelligible. Only later did I learn that these marks were Hebrew. Since that time, I have been preoccupied by the possibility that abstract forms can connect us to a reality beyond language, and bridge the thin line between nonsense and the divine.

Somewhere between the visual noise of television static, and the visual order of the text you are now reading, lies a fascinating realm of visual semi-sense. Precisely where do the borders of that realm lie? By studying that realm of semi-sense, we surmise that we may come to a deeper understanding of precisely how sense-making occurs at all. To do this, we have written software which attempts to generate artifacts that seem to make sense, but in fact, don't.

The particular goal of this work is to bring about the specific feeling of semi-sense one experiences when one recognizes—but cannot read—the unfamiliar writing of another culture. Our Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an interactive system in which a user guides an evolutionary genetic algorithm in order to create and explore coherent sets of abstract glyphs. Hopefully, these mark-like forms resemble the plausible alphabets of human civilizations with which we simply happen to be unacquainted.

Implementation
The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is comprised of two software systems: an interactive client-side applet, which allows users to create and evolve their abstract letterforms, and a server-side archiving system which stores the user creations as downloadable TrueType fonts.

At the heart of the interactive applet is a genetic algorithm. This algorithm attempts to evolve a population of candidate glyphs according to a set of fitness metrics established by the user. Some of these fitness metrics are obtained from an initial 'seed glyph' provided by the user, while others are controlled by the user in real-time, through a set of parametric sliders and other interface controls. The glyphs are evolved both as individuals (i.e. each in relation to an ideal metric, in order to enhance their individual 'letterness'), and also as a species (i.e. each in contradistinction to each other, in order to enhance the variety of the alphabet as a whole).

The glyphs themselves are the virtual trajectories of synthetic hand movements, produced by a 3-dimensional physics simulation of a hand-pen-paper system. This model incorporates such forces as the response of hand muscles to neural firing rates; the inertia and intrisic viscosity of the arm; gravity; and the friction of the stylus against the virtual writing surface.

When the user is finished evolving their abstract alphabet, its glyphs are converted into quadratic Bezier outlines and then transmitted to the server, which stores them as a PC-formatted TrueType font. This font can be downloaded at the time of its creation, or at any future time from an online archives of user creations. Visitors have created more than 700 alphabets since the project's launch (1 October 2001).

The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is currently a work-in-progress. While this version (1.0) deals strictly with single-stroked cursive alphabetic forms, future versions of the ASM will explore the possibilities of cut- and printed-letterform simulation.

Copyright
We're very interested in the proliferation of the Machine's abstract alphabets! We encourage you to let us know how and where you have found them useful. {Contact email: golan at flong dot com} Basically, the fonts created by the visitors to this site are in the public domain, and can be used however and wherever you like. The remainder of this notice is merely intended to protect our public font collection from an unscrupulous reseller, to wit:

The digital typefaces produced by the Alphabet Synthesis Machine (ASM) are protected by Copyright as a collective work and/or compilation. You may copy individual typefaces for your own personal use, and use these typefaces in published designs, but may not commercially exploit or reproduce any significant portion of the ASM typeface collection in any form without the express permission of the Authors. The Authors of the ASM reserve the right to reproduce, modify or delete any typeface contained herein. The ASM software and all downloadable typefaces are distributed on an "as is" basis without warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including, without limitation, implied warranties of fitness for a particular purpose.