Current issue - March 2022 - Issue 225 – Frieze Magazine frieze.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from frieze.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
At a time when the basic power structures of the art world are being questioned, collectives and individuals are fighting against the very institutions funding and displaying their work.
The New Alphabet Explores And Reimagines Communicative Hierarchies
The New Alphabet is a series from publisher Spector Books that explores and ultimately counters and reconceptualizes the functionalization of languages like DNA, binary code, the human body, and music playlists. Over 25 volumes, these hierarchies are deconstructed and assessed, old use cases get discarded, and they record alphabets-meanings become altered and transformed, all using graphics, colors, patterns, textures, and prose.
Throughout the series, the volumes themselves become malleable elements you can arrange to form ideas, sentences, and concepts, an alphabet in and of itself using the end covers. Word clusters, gradients, and other elements come designed to form a bespoke grammatic structure within itself, leading the reader to explore the overarching concept of alphabet-like constructs. Essays exploring the central themes of each volume compliment the graphics and illustrations.