2025
Typeface, Book
Yet this design rationalism oftentimes feels—as walking in zero gravity—like flailing in a world not so rational. The starting point of this anthology is to imagine what design can look like amid absurdity.
The anthology peers into fields adjacent to design—literature, art, and others—to reaffirm the role of fiction, and gathers cases where fiction has been strategized within the design field. Beyond this, it looks at projects that have been proposed as counterexamples or alternatives to design paradigms operating as truths within specific spatiotemporal contexts, causing some degree of rupture. This is because
the greatest significance of fiction, as this anthology sees it, is to cast doubt on truth.
【Vertica】 is a typographic fiction developed from this foundation. 【Vertica】 imagines a world where the propagation of reading direction has been reversed. 【Vertica】 was excavated near the portal that once connected that world and ours. This anthology is a contradictory object wedged between the homeland of that excavated artifact and the homeland of our own. It’s a predicament that only permits a slippery reading where the systems of both homelands slide past each other like water and oil.