Lettrism
レトリスム / 1946–1970s / Style / Experimental Typography
A Paris-born movement that freed the letter from its duty of carrying meaning, treating sound and shape themselves as the material of the work. From surfaces paved with unreadable characters, to hypergraphy's proliferating signs, to marks scratched directly into film stock, it expanded the experiment of handling letters as physical matter.
Surfaces paved with unreadable characters / Handwriting mixed with type / Hypergraphy of proliferating signs / Letters handled as painterly material
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Experimental type specimens and title sequences where letterforms are pure texture · Music and poetry-scene artwork built from dense asemic writing
- Type
- Invented alphabets, asemic glyphs and salvaged type mixed without hierarchy
- Composition
- All-over fields of signs with no reading path; density itself is the composition
- Material
- Ink, paint and scratched film or paper—letters applied as physical marks
- Caution
- Avoid leaving legible words in the field; a single readable phrase reinstates the meaning the style exists to suspend.
- Further study
- Isidore Isou's theory / The definition of hypergraphy / The split that led to the Situationists