Zengqi Guo
Alien Encyclopedia
Alien Encyclopedia is a body of work that analyzes, expands, redefines, and leverages the definition of “alien” as both problematic and an avenue of possibility. By mapping the word “alien” as a fragmented play of alternatives, I translate the lessons derived from this exploration into a maker’s lexicon. I use “alien” to frame my identity, as a prompt to ground my projects, a factor to interrupt existing typography and to spark questions, a generative tool to explore the interpolation between the familiar and unfamiliar, and to incite new solutions and actions to solve the problems we are facing now. Alien Encyclopedia provides a new communication framework from the ‘outside’ to harness and enhance the ways in which we enact our humanity.
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Re: To The Golden Record
Video & Type Specimen
2019 & 2020
The vocabulary of any language is the outcome of a specific culture and the carrier of cultural information. The symbol and the glyphs are the carriers of language. The symbol itself has no meaning, and only the signified symbol can be used to communicate. When we master a new language, we can expand the range of conversations we can have across countries, across continents, across planets, across species, across time, until we can communicate with everything in the universe. This is to constantly transcend the current context, and explore the future of communication methods and objects.
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New Blackletter
Type Specimen
2019
Using the method of juxtaposition, I combined these two ways of drawing letters into one, keeping calligraphy features in the Blackletter at specific positions of the strokes and using geometric shapes to emulate the mechanism from the rational design of 1803. New Blackletter is composed of geometrical shapes, and the circle specifies all the curve parts. It eliminates the complexity while still retaining the Blackletter’s characteristics and functionality.
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MiXeR | Type specimen
Type specimen
2021
In this experimental typeface, I blended the upper and lower case of each letter in proportion to try to establish a visual harmony in their complex relationship. Differences are allowed to exist here because it is not about “either/or” but rather “and/and.” Both uppercase and lowercase letters coexist in the whole, blurring formal boundaries and building interconnections.
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MiXeR | Middle Case Manifesto
Poster
2021
The text of the Middlecase Manifesto poster's uses this typeface to provoke the interconnected relationships referred to in Rosi's essay—building new ways of writing to express new ways of thinking that reinterpret and imagine collaborative relationships in the posthuman era.
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ML Cookbook
Book
2020
This project raises questions about whether machines can really think, and how designers might collaborate with robots in the posthuman era. I used the process of cooking to simulate the way StyleGAN2 generates images. In the ML Cookbook, the generator is a trainee in a cooking school and the discriminator is like a gastronome. Does the Chef Generator literally “cook” tasty food? Or is it merely simulating the ability to cook real food?
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What is it like to be a fiber?
UV print on acrylic
2021
Inspired by Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to be a bat?, What is it like to be a fiber? evokes the feeling of being inside a thing rather than rendering a literal picture of it—like Cubism, this visual study focuses more on a composition's internal abstraction than the external appearance we're used to seeing. By learning from the process, I think about the question of how can we be more empathetic artists? What makes humans and non-humans different and what’s the connection between us?
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Once Upon A Time
Publication
2021
In August 2021, Sabrina Ji and I attended a one-week program, DESERT LIFE: Field Studies of Art+Nature in the Southwest, in the Chihuahuan Desert, New Mexico. The program was hosted by ART+BIO Collaborative, an artist and scientist-led non-profit organization that fosters the integration of science, nature, and art through novel collaborations, public engagement, education, and research. The desert environment is alien to most people; this publication is dedicated to bringing familiarity to the unfamiliar by using our novel perspective. We created experimental typefaces to challenge legibility, and created a narrative in-between reality and illusion.
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Once Upon A Time
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Once Upon A Time
Once Upon A Time is always used as a conventional opening of a story. Here it is used to tell stories in an unconventional way. This publication is a documentation of a trip to the Chihuahuan Desert and a specimen poster collection of four experimental typefaces inspired by the desert trip. One side of each sheet tells the story of what Sabrina and I learned from this unique desert experience, and the other side shows using graphic design as a response to environmental factors.
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Once Upon A Time
Each word in the title of this publication also functions as the name of each of four typefaces, which subjects are Multiplicity, Zoom in & Zoom out, Empathy, and Metaphor. We hope to demonstrate the close intertwined relationship we have with nature, and to celebrate its profound beauty.
- Architecture
- Ceramics
- Design Engineering
- Digital + Media
- Furniture Design
- Global Arts and Cultures
- Glass
- Graphic Design
- Industrial Design
- Interior Architecture
- Jewelry + Metalsmithing
- Landscape Architecture
- Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies
- Painting
- Photography
- Printmaking
- Sculpture
- TLAD
- Textiles
