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The New Alphabet
DNA #1
HKW - Haus der Kulturen der Welt/Bernd Scherer

88 pp.

with black-white and colour illustrations

perfect bound softcover



Leipzig January, 2021
ISBN: 9783959054539

Width: 15 cm
Length: 23 cm

Language(s): English

Editor
HKW - Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bernd Scherer

Designer
Malin Gewinner, Hannes Drißner, Markus Dreßen

Design Concept
Olaf Nicolai, Malin Gewinner, Hannes Drißner

Text
Ann Cotten, Yuk Hui, Ben Lerner, Bernd Scherer

Artist
Kanako Tada, Wolfgang Tillmans

Photographer
Wolfgang Tillmans

Operating in the space between a regulatory cosmos and the chaos of life, spoken language and its written notation unfold in different directions. Proceeding from the digital as a seemingly universal notational substrate, the first volume of Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet) series tracks the interplay between these two tendencies by looking at a series of examples: the relationship between binary code and Leibniz’s philosophy of Monadology, the technological and cosmological aspects of non­ Western writing systems, which are antithetical to a monolithic understanding of language, and the power of the Alphabet Song to teach children the alphabet, its ordering principle cloaked in poetic form. The texts are accompa­ nied by images created by artist Wolfgang Tillmans.

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