Michael Winkler

I never had any plans to become an artist. My passion was music. In 1980, I was Managing Director of the Public Access Electronic Music Studio at a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in Seattle. On a rainy night in December of that year, I was at home in my room at the Hotel Savoy. I was exploring a new approach to composing music based on sounds of speech (vocalizations having no association to language or meaning). My plan was to create a list of nonsense words that would be recorded as source material to be processed through the Buchla Music Synthesizer. After an hour of trying to create the list, my paper was still blank. It was more difficult than expected to create expressions of speech that weren’t related to words in any language (and how would I even know if they sounded like words in a language I didn’t speak?). I was about to give up, when I thought of an idea. I’d place the alphabet in a circle of twenty-six corresponding letter-points and inscribe simple patterns from point to point to generate random letter-sequences. The first step was to divide 360 degrees by twenty-six to evenly space the alphabetic points around the circle. I was disappointed when the result was 13.846153 . . . In music, proportional relationships that aren’t expressible as a whole number are unnatural.

I went to the window and looked down at the street to see if it was still raining—I was thinking of going to the Comet Tavern. Then out of nowhere, something I’d read or heard came to mind: “The vowels are the soul of words; the consonants are the body.” I wondered what would happen if I spaced the vowels equally around the circle, then spaced the consonants equally on the arc-segments between the vowels. I knew the five regular vowels would create a pentagonal relationship (a pentagonal relationship is an expression of the Golden Ratio—as in “Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo da Vinci). I rifled through my desk looking for the circular protractor I used when creating graphic scores. When I calculated the degree locations and saw they were all whole numbers, I was excited.

It was clear from the configuration’s bilateral symmetry that “E” rather than “A” was the natural point at 0/360 degrees (it’s interesting that “E” is the most commonly occurring letter). When I examined the proportional relationships more closely, I saw something so surprising I had to recheck it several times to believe it was true. The proportional ratio that defined every relationship of the alphabetic configuration was 2:3. Two to three is the most harmonious ratio of sound frequencies to the human ear other than the simple doubling of the octave—it’s the basis of harmonic progression in all forms of music (it’s known as the Perfect Fifth). I couldn’t wait to see what kind of nonsense words would be generated by inscribing patterns.

I began by inscribing a simple pattern of axial symmetry. After I drew three lines, I noticed I was interconnecting letter-points that spelled part of the word “axial.” When I mapped the complete word, the image was a perfect expression of axial symmetry! The striking coincidence distracted me from my goal of creating nonsense words. I wondered what kind of visual forms other words might create. I traced the alphabetic configuration onto another sheet of paper and mapped the spelling of the word “shapes.” I couldn’t believe my eyes when it created the image of a classic hand-drawn star. Two coincidences in a row seemed impossible. Next, I mapped the word “sizes.” It created an image of two irregular triangles pointing at each other. I cut the smaller triangle out and put it inside the larger triangle; their shapes matched—the only difference was their size!

In an adrenaline driven frenzy, I gathered my working materials and ran up Pike Street to the art center. I used the Xerox machine to make copies of the alphabetic configuration. When the other staff members arrived in the morning, I was still mapping words. Everyone was fascinated by what they saw. The Director of the Marymoor Gallery arrived for a meeting. She was so intrigued by my discovery that she invited me to present it in a solo exhibition.

This year is the forty-fifth anniversary of my ongoing project. Over the years, not only have I had to learn the techniques necessary to create works in almost every media (choice of media is based on the implications being explored), my discovery has led to involvement in the fields of literature, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and the scientific study of word recognition. Initially, I didn’t think of my discovery as art. I just thought of it as an entirely mysterious and inexplicable phenomena that I had to share. It was visual, so an art gallery was a good place to share it. At the time I didn’t realize my discovery posed a challenge to the very foundation of linguistics and post-structuralist philosophy.

Over a century ago, Ferdinand de Saussure made an assumption that the signs of language are arbitrary (no intrinsic relationship between the sign for a word and its meaning). His assumption became a foundation of linguistics, semiotics, and the post-structuralist philosophical theories of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and many others. Saussure’s assumption of arbitrariness was based on the observation that—except for a few instances of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism—there is no connection between the sound of a word and its meaning. But it turns out that the logic of his assumption was based on a misconception of how the signs of spoken language are perceived and processed. It has recently been discovered that the signs of spoken words are actually their vocalic gestures, not their phonetic sounds. And the accepted theory of how we read written words, which supported Saussure’s assumption, has also been found to be incorrect. We actually decipher the sequencing of the letters rather than reading a word’s overall shape or outline as had been thought. The process of reading words is unique to language—it’s entirely different from the process of perceiving an image. We know very little about the source of vocalic gestures and the unintentionally constructed coding of the signs, so there is no logical argument that supports the assumption that they are arbitrary—the question of the nature of the signs for words is entirely open.

The alphabetic patterning in the signs for words is the result of the collective choices of all those who played a role in the origin and evolution of the signs. The signs of language are, not only the very foundation of culture, they’re the primary external manifestation of human consciousness. The choices that created them were not made consciously or based on any kind of logical plan; they evolved organically. They’re similar to choices in automatism and abstract expressionism except that they result from collective activity extending back to the origin of the word. Consequently, our linguistic ancestors unintentionally created the word-imagery. I simply make their creation visible.

My process is as rigorous as any scientific approach to creating models of natural phenomena. Its foundation is a uniquely spaced circle of alphabetic letter-points—a circle is the only regular two-dimensional figure with no pre-established point locations. The vowel/consonant distinction inherent in the structure of the alphabet is the only organizing factor in the spacing of the letter-points. The configuration and all features of the process are fixed—they don’t change from word to word. The imagery is a genuine spatial model of the alphabetic patterning encoded in the letter-sequences of written words (it’s an isomorphic visual transliteration of the alphabetic system of the entire lexicon of all romanized languages). In 2013, I overlaid the alphabetic configuration on a color-wheel of pigments to create a process which generates the color in my paintings—recent paintings incorporate magenta with the word-generated color (magenta is created entirely by the human sensory system; it doesn’t occur in the color spectrum).

My work is genuinely interdisciplinary. The visual/literary content is inherently interrelated, which fosters cross-disciplinary implications in a range of fields, but also makes the work difficult to categorize. It’s hard to imagine how my life’s work could have come into being if it hadn’t emerged through my unexpected encounter.

 

References

Michael Winkler’s website.

Winkler, Michael. “A Major Challenge,” chapter from The Image of Language.

Image at top: Michael Winkler; Alignments (details), mixed media gallery installation (Academy of Fine Art, Poznan, Poland), 2006.