‘Artists Focus on what Researchers Disregard. And Vice Versa.’

What is striking about your ‘Unreadable Script’ in manuscript cultures, volume 20, is that it doesn’t consist entirely of unreadable characters. We see subheadings, captions, and references to images that we know from other articles in this journal. How does this affect your signs?

This contribution was guided by the idea to adapt to the formal layout of the mc volumes, but also to the general structure and rules that apply to scientific articles. My contribution plays with familiar-looking elements and undermines them at the same time. There is tension and contrast, but also correspondence. The signs are given a new role, as they directly interact with something that does not concern them.

I placed very different fonts in a close visual context, for example abbreviations written at a high speed and carefully executed tracks, written with a broad pen, that almost tread on the spot. In this respect, the conventions of the journal have allowed me a very free and playful composition. But it has had no influence on the characters themselves.

This interaction with the familiar structural elements of a scientific journal creates a humorous, perhaps even ironic note – especially through the footnotes and the sudden readable insertions. Did you mean to create a sympathetic parody of the rigorous appearance of scientific publications?

During my time as an Artist in Residence at the cluster, I came into contact with terms whose meaning I had no or even the wrong idea of. ‘Paracontent’ is one such term. I wanted to make it fruitful for my contribution, which can be understood as paracontent that takes the intentions of the journal seriously, but artistically transforms and thus comments on them.

Yes, there is certainly a humorous note to it. At the same time, however, I also see what you describe as rigour. From my perspective, impulses from the arts should appear much more often in such volumes. Research and art are separated by their methods and ways of working, but also by convictions and attitudes. At the same time, I have experienced here at the cluster that we sometimes work on the same issues. Sometimes I think that artists focus on precisely those things that researchers disregard. And vice versa. Mutual respect includes a twinkle in the eye when engaging with each other.

In your contribution, the illustrations play a special role. Although they consist of unreadable signs themselves, they stand out remarkably clearly from the ‘main text’. Why is it that we can ‘read’ some signs as images and some as text? Or do your signs completely dissolve the distinction between these two categories?

Even where my works at first glance appear to be pictures, they are based on pure writing processes. I do not prime a surface on which I then place signs, but write in strict lines from top left to bottom right. However, I overwrite this line structure with a different pen and a different ink. As a result, the line becomes increasingly blurred. Characters intertwine, mix, and enter into spatial relationships. For Figure 2, for example, I used inks containing solvents. When they penetrate a white layer of writing, they turn it blue. And in the very last phase, I actually allowed the abbreviations to be positioned differently from the line. This allows the text to tip over into the pictorial, the separation between these categories becomes blurred. But even conventional writing consists of the discursive (language) and the iconic (image) and is therefore, as Sybille Krämer puts it, always a hybrid formation.