The analytical language of John Wilkins

︎︎︎2022
︎︎︎experimental, graphic design, editorial

The analytical language of John Wilkins is an essay written by Jorge Luis Borges that addresses the arbitrary nature of taxonomies, either to form a language or simply a way of understanding and ordering the world. "There is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural,” he says.

In the story he mentions a fictional Chinese encyclopedia called El Emporio Celestial de Conocimientos Benévolos which makes an absurd classification of the world's animals and lays the foundations for this visual and graphic research.

Faced with the impossibility of finding illustrative images on this encyclopedia, I have experimented with the relationships that are created between verbal and visual language based on the nature of Morse code (the dot, the dash and the distance between these two symbols).