preceding emptiness: alternative arabic typographic technologies

Preceding Emptiness: Alternative Arabic Typographic Technologies is the latest light installation in a body of work imagining alternative typographic histories by constructing unconventional language display technologies. Here, freed from structural conventions pressed by the dominance of Latin scripts, we celebrate the formal potential of the Arabic language. Bright, bold, blinking verbs cycle through this hundred-segment display. These formalisms work heritage into the future, creating a catalyst toward alternative realities of becoming. Where these words are forces driving toward an unwritten landscape populated by unconventional technologies, in turn shaping new typographic structures.

The series of words takes us to the roots and connotations of verbs to be. Arabic Sarf (Arabic Morphology and Etymology) is the internal assembly of a word by way of
patterns of vowelization and introduction of extra letters, which constitute a template. The template provides additional connotations “the bolder the template, the heavier the meaning”.

As the title suggests, ـتفعل اسـ is a dynamic verb form of six letters, which means transitionally becoming, literally and figuratively, moving from one state to the other, and
suggests deliberate and successive forms of the action.