What would it look like if a computer invented an alphabet?
.notyetdef, a collaboration between Fred Benenson and Tyler Shoemaker, uses AI to probe the limits of Unicode’s 137,993 assigned codepoints – individual addresses that carry the information needed to render everything from the letter “A” to 😍.
But no one font can render all of Unicode, making the entire database nearly impossible to holistically reckon with, even for computers. This is Unicode’s paradox, a conflict that signals a folly at the heart of the standard: the impossible pursuit of distilling all human writing into one system.
This folly is most evident in .notdef characters, such as � or □, mysterious glyphs that appear when software can't find the right character to write.
.notyetdef offers a new set of undefined glyphs. Conjured from a custom generative adversarial network trained on vast quantities of Unicode glyphs, the result is a familiar yet confusing grid of glyphs designed purely by a machine.
