One of the many aberrations that distinguish the Anthropocene – the era which we have created and don’t know what to do with (or, perhaps, we pretend not to know)- is the so-called infodemic. 

Neologism, born from the dog chasing its tail effect between information and the pandemic, refers to the huge amount of data which, in every moment of our lives, is forced into our minds. This actually creates a cognitive overload which makes it impossible to truly focus our attention, make a simple decision or just concentrate on a certain topic. In every moment of our lives we have access to more information than ever before in the history of humankind: texts, photos, current affairs videos, news, politics, economy, finance, technology, science, sport, fashion and everything else pop up on our phones, tablet and computers with a frequency and quantity which is more similar to a tsunami than a normal psychological flow of information. 

One of the many things that derives from this information overload is disinformation, confusion and insecurity for a growing part of the population plus a fertile growing ground for fake news, conspiracy and after-truths. 

Moreover, the immense mass of data (more or less all knowledgeable) over the last thirty years has been translated into bytes to be accumulated into the dense cobweb of the World Wide Web, it is feeding the enormous potential of artificial intelligence computing which, right now, is rising to the top of the headlines thanks to the impressive show of strength in real-time processing, with the use of statistical models, of information and its complex interactions. In this way it represents an epochal leap in quality as regards to an increasingly realistic ‘’representation’’ of intelligence even if it is artificial. 

With astounding speed and amazing results A.I is able to generate texts and images (and soon video) which very few people would be able to tell apart from those made by human intellect and, notwithstanding the hallucinations to which they are subject, can only arouse a sense of astonishment and restlessness in whomever is witness to this extraordinary progress. 

This double track (infodemic to one side, a tank full of information to the other), sprung from the immense amount of data, intellectual shoves, philosophers theories and deep thinkers who consider not only the scenarios that await us but also the nature itself of the information. And obviously art cannot escape from a reckoning on these issues, striving to investigate the matter in depth, beginning with the elements at the heart of the message. 

Beginning with the written word, the foundation of our knowledge, we are pushed to reflect not only upon the meaning but also on the signifier, that’s to say the ‘’sign’’, on the form, on its perception, its evolution and if it ‘‘goes above and beyond’’. An exercise which can begin with an apparently simple question: what will happen if the ‘atoms’ of writing, that’s to say the characters and the glyphs (the so called ‘types’) and their ‘molecules’ and their ‘composition’ which is to say the words, the phrases and the texts which give meaning to our lives, come alive and start to integrate between themselves, meeting, blending and getting stuck without continuity solutions? 

What happens if they are pushed by an unstoppable generating force preceded by uniting, mixing and blending? If, pulled by a palingenetic force, they couldn’t find anything better to do than mix, bind and congregate themselves? If moved by mysterious forces, if they inevitably merged, evolved and took shape? What would happen? Are we standing in front of an arid, entropic type of chaos without meaning or can we start to speak a new language, to express ourselves again, to interact again? 

The Typomachia project was born from these assumptions, a sort of arena where we can measure the strength of the meaning and how it evolves in a Darwinian sense of the term. Where, contrary to popular belief, it’s not the strongest who survive but those who can adapt. The most adaptable in communicating, expressing, giving meaning to it all. 

This semantic experiment takes its momentum from the incipit of classic world literature, true totems of human wisdom, which are freed from their ‘institutional’ context and, like in a type of petri-dish, observed whilst they interact between themselves, in a controlled evolutive procedure and with a far from definitive selection process, in which you know where you started from but not where you will end up. 

With these dynamics, Typomachia also adds a third dimension, and it does it in the only possible way for two dimensional entities: honorary citizens of Flatland, subjects who can only interact with three dimensional space through the superposition of two dimensional planes thus bypassing their flatness and speaking amongst themselves with a new prospect of depth to which they look in search of new identity. Much like the intention of Plexiglass; an intense, pure stereoscopic expedient, a precious element which opens the world to the privilege of spatiality. 

This, in a nutshell, are the bases from which Typomachia started this project which in its first chapter is made up of fifteen works of art inspired by the incipit from many world-wide literary classics (which you will find in the pages of this web site) taken from timeless masterpieces, so well known and recorded and which represents an ideal trampoline from which to launch oneself without a safety net, being naively inclined towards the search for ‘another’ language, through which the observer may experiment with new expressivity, reflecting on the foreknowledge, the meaning and try to find the literary clues which represent our present and may give sense to our far from definite future. 

Cavriglia, April 2023.