KorAbic Alphabet

UIC / Basel 2-day workshop, April 2015
With Rasha Dakkak

Merging our interests in alphabets, Arabic for Rasha and Korean for Alice, we discovered chance alignments within the 13 card, 4 suits, 52-card deck structure of the workshop. There are 28 basic Arabic characters and 24 basic Korean characters; adding up to 52. Additionally, when we compared the sounds of the two alphabets, we discovered that there are 13 overlapping sounds.

Using the 13 overlapping sounds, we merged the corresponding characters from each of the alphabets to create a new symbol. Rasha explored geometric versions of the alphabets, while Alice explored more calligraphic versions, each representing a different suit. We still need to develop the other two suits, but our thought is that they would be formally related versions of the two we have already developed. On the back of each card we display the sound of the symbol using the English alphabet, our common language.

Workshop by Matt Wizinsky.