The Nexus between
Typography and Poetics
Batsheva Goldman-Ida
Kobi Franco, a designer, artist and lecturer, embarked on a speculative analysis of the Hebrew alphabet. Following on an exercise that developed arbitrarily, as he himself confessed in the introduction to his study, Franco nevertheless set out for himself certain methodological rules of engagement. He chose a sans-serif typeface from the 1920s, developing it into a typeface of his own which he called Va’ad. From the very beginning, this choice of the square Assyrian script, rather than the ancient Hebrew script or a cursive type, enabled the project to proceed step by step, in a process akin to the use of building blocks or rods, which Franco calls “atoms.”
In Franco’s project, the Molecular Typography Laboratory (2019—24), one exploration leads to another on the same theme, or to a different theme, or gives rise to a new research subject, which suggests a new way of thinking. In a sense, it is a game: an ordered set of rules that allows for unbounded creativity. Let us delineate the “rules of the game” established by Franco: the first premise is that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet have molecular and electromagnetic properties. Eleven sections constitute the parameters of the study and summarize the results of the laboratory research, organized in a way similar to the Periodic Table. The project consists of more than 150 investigations, which Franco refers to as “tests.” These “tests” explore subjects such as foundations, language, gender, formula, weight, 3D, gravitation, generative research, color, word play, type and image. The sections are presented in a flow chart of circles, which recall the configuration of the “Sefirot” (spheres) in the Kabbalah. Each letter is composed of a combination of six atoms of different sizes, which Franco designed based on a square grid, and tagged with the Latin letters D, E, I, J, K, V. In Franco’s experiment, it was determined that the atom K only rotates on an X axis, while all other atoms rotate on both axes, X and Y. As a result, letters including a rotated atom K cannot connect to other letters, leading to a division into two groups of letters — the “blue” letters and the “orange” letters — which cannot function together. This limitation was exploited as a way to remove words that include the orange letters from language, and thus to introduce Constrained Writing, used by the OuLiPo Group. At a later stage, Franco decided to circumvent this problem by inverting the orange letters as if in a mirror, thus allowing the two sets of letters to coexist. In the chapter concerned with the theme of “gender,” Franco decided to call the blue letters “binary” and the orange letters “non-binary,” thus allowing for an evaluation of letters on a gendered continuum.
Batsheva Goldman-Ida is a graduate of the Parsons School of Design, New York, and holds a doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a curator and scholar whose research focuses on the interface of Kabbalah and art and on the history of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. Her publications include, among others, Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah, Ze’ev Raban: Hebrew Symbolist, and the entry on Kabbalah in art and architecture in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion.
