The Spirit and the Letter

Series Conveners

Paul Wilson (Design), Liz Stainforth (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies) and Paul Cooke (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies)

Project overview

Auxiliary languages have existed for many centuries, with each iteration aiming towards a better version of this imperfect tool. At the heart of much of this activity is an impulse to create a better world, a utopian vision that seeks a common good and attempts, through language, to strip out those things that separate or divide the human race. If this impulse can be understood as the spirit of utopia, the letter introduces a concrete element, the building blocks through which auxiliary languages are developed and circulated.

Perhaps the most famous of such languages is Esperanto, invented by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887. He believed that a common language would eliminate the problems of translation and bring about a harmonious brotherhood of man (sic) and, ultimately, world peace.

While such aspirations have, hence far, proven unrealisable, Esperanto continues to be widely spoken and is currently the world’s most popular auxiliary language. West Yorkshire is intimately connected to the history of Esperanto and founded the first British society of Esperanto-speakers, in November 1902 in the town of Keighley. One of the Keighley Society’s members - Joseph Rhodes - was also responsible for the first Esperanto-English dictionary. The Keighley Esperanto Society continued to meet into the latter part of the twentieth century and its archive remains in the local library.

The series will take as its point of departure the remaining material traces of the Keighley Esperanto Society - the dictionary and the archive - which act as the final glimpses of a particular kind of social dreaming.

These traces also reflect an overlap between the utopian desires manifested in communities such as the Keighley Esperantists and graphic design’s often ignored radical aspirations for societal transformation. Such experiments in design have been sporadic and, like experiments in invented language, only partially successful. However, there is a link between them insofar as graphic design, like language, works to both represent and translate culture and community, and writing systems operate within a context and culture determined by their histories and developed through their on-going use by communities.

More recently, notions of speculative and critical practice have emerged as themes in design research. These create a space for alternative practices of design to take place. While such activities can be functionally ambiguous and might seem non-rational, by working with narrative, scenario and materialised forms of satire they challenge design’s current structural limits and engage audiences in a critical relationship with objects and systems of visual communication.