What Is Life?
Artificial Music
A Kind of World War
Re_Visioning Bodies
Das Neue Alphabet, Publication series, Photo: Markus Dreßen
Das Neue Alphabet, Publication series, Photo: Markus Dreßen

2021/2022

Das Neue Alphabet – Publication series

A publication series with 25 volumes
2021/2022

Edited by Detlef Diederichsen, Anselm Franke, Katrin Klingan, Daniel Neugebauer and Bernd Scherer
Spector Books, Leipzig

Available at the webshop

According to the constellation principle: The series explores new semiotic worlds for alternative knowledge production.

Alphabets, binary code, DNA—the current explosion of knowledge relies on the world being dismembered and divided into the tiniest of units, making it amenable to computation and manipulation. Languages, codes, and other representational modes based on symbols are thus put in the service of political control, surveillance technologies, and economic exploitation. The series Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet) with 25 volumes counters this process of functionalization with poetic discombobulations, sensuous recodings, and creolizations. The publications are organized around the formal principle of constellation: a range of different themes, modes of representation, artistic positions, and graphic elements are combined and recombined in multiple variations. The series sets out to formulate new semiotic worlds conducive to an alternative knowledge production. The topics range from Chinese pictograms to body language and music playlists.

The design by Olaf Nicolai adopts the logic of the alphabet. It repeatedly varies elements such as the title lettering, selected words, colors and the folds of the cover. These elements can be combined in different ways; they link the volumes with one another and open up a playing field for individual arrangements. The volumes, published in a German and an English edition by Spector Books in Leipzig.

Awarded the Stiftung Buchkunst Prize for the Most Beautiful German Books of 2021

Part of The New Alphabet