Unicode Landscape

snow capped mountain
(u+1f3d4 🏔)

camping
(u+1f3d5 🏕)

beach with umbrella
(u+1f3d6 🏖)

desert island (u+1f3dd 🏝)

desert (u+1f3dc 🏜)

national park (u+1f3de 🏞)

SNOW CAPPED MOUNTAIN 🏔
U+1F3D5
Embossed paper
29.7x29.7cm/11.69x11.69in
Unique / Signed on verso

DESERT ISLAND 🏝
U+1F3DD
Embossed paper
29.7x29.7cm/11.69x11.69in
Unique / Signed on verso

DESERT 🏜
U+1F3DC
Embossed paper
29.7x29.7cm/11.69x11.69in
Unique / Signed on verso

Unicode Landscape 🏔🏝🏜
At Positions fair, Kate Vass Gallery, 2024

Communication depends on agreed conventions in order to "work", and the same stands for communication through digital means. The world's many languages and alphabets are able to work properly in internet information exchange thanks to Unicode, a text encoding standard conceived to support all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Thus, the Unicode standard are the fundaments of communication in the digital sphere, veritable building blocks of the internet. Due to the constant need to include new characters and symbols, the standard is updated from time to time by an organization that coordinates Unicode's development: the Unicode Consortium, based in Mountain View, California, USA.

As a worldwide character encoding convention, Unicode is vast (149,813 characters in total, as of version 15 in 2023), reflecting the West's obsession with universalization (tellingly, Unicode stands for Universal Coded Character Set). Unicode, however, is guided by a practical imperative rather than a Western-biased one: its goal is to be a reliable standard that enables the simultaneous uses of all different writing systems by all internet users. Besides the many different alphabets, such as Latin, Greek, Cyrilic, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc., it also covers ancient scripts, alchemical symbols, currency symbols, disused alphabets, pictograms (including Emojis), graphic symbols of different sorts, among much more.

Marcel Schwittlick's new work takes as a point of departure the open questions surrounding Unicode and the many emojis it entails. His main interest in creating (analog) drawings from digital sources is expanding to include new tools, problems and solutions. Technological apparatuses originally conceived to be utilitarian, such as Braille printers and electronic ink displays, are now subverted by Schwittlick's hands and become free of their "obligation" to perform for purely utilitarian purposes. He created a series of works on paper where Unicode-standardised emojis are braille-printed. Braille embossing, the term for imprinting Braille on paper, is an analog outcome that requires an invisible grid in order to occur; thus, the braille dot is analogous to the pixel, a bridge between digital and analog.

He has also been exploring the electronic ink display as a media surface. Having no connection whatsoever with plotters, a tool that Schwittlick has explored thoroughly in the past, this technology doesn't emit light and was conceived to emulate the properties of paper, being easy on the eyes and energy efficient (it only needs energy when rendering a new image). Schwittlick animates the electronic ink display as a screen, having a performance aspect that reaches a final stage once the energy source is removed, becoming a static work at the end. Furthermore, just as braille embossing, image-making on electronic ink displays is also dependent on a grid to organize digital input into analog visual information. Schwittlick's interest in oscillating back and forth between the digital and analog realms finds new potentials and results through these technologies. In both series of work, the invisible grids work as coordinate systems allowing the machine to draw, imprint, or stamp with precision. Digital, discrete values translate into physicality and Unicode's invisible omnipresence becomes visible through Schwittlick's emojis, digital pictograms that we all recognize from our virtual interactions, materially embodied by titanium dioxide particles and by ink on paper.

Text: Lucas Rehnman

Unicode v1.0 (1990)

Unifont 15.1