Anti-writing and Yukio Ota’s Exit Sign

exit

In the late 1970s, Yukio Ota designed the “running man” symbol above to mark emergency exits, a symbol the ISO later adopted as the recommended exist sign. As part of a Slate Magazine series on signs, Julia Turner wrote about the details of that story and the slow adoption of the symbol in the U.S. What really caught my attention, however, was the following paragraph about Ota’s grander scheme for a universal pictographic language.

Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe's increasingly industrial economy. Neurath used pictograms—for man, woman, sugar, wheat, gunship, etc.—to produce infographics that he displayed to packed crowds in a convention hall in Vienna, Austria. Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. In 1964, Ota even invented a symbolic language called LoCoS, the Lovers' Communication System, which supposedly took just an hour to learn.…Ota's colleague and fellow icon designer Aaron Marcus recalls that LoCoS was intended to “bring human beings together and … help them love each other a little bit better.”

Julia Turner, “The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man” Slate Magazine, March 8, 02010

After having spent the better part of this (academic) quarter researching anti-writing (or free writing, or asemic writing; “anti-writing” is art historian Wu Hung’s term which he applies to contemporary and historical Chinese calligraphy) I was pleasantly surprised to find this new connection between graphic design and anti-writing. Idiosyncratic pictographic systems like Ota’s are a peculiar form of anti-writing but they do play a part in that visual redefinition of language I was looking at in my research. For instance, Ota’s work reminded me of the work of Xu Bing, a contemporary Chinese artist who has, on occasion, used AIGA transportation and wayfinding signs in conjunction with his “Anglo-Chinese” logograms. Xu’s and Ota’s intentions are not the same but I think it’s fair to see Xu’s work as a comment on both graphic designers’ ambitions of universality—which Ota shares—and our individual expectations of cultural singularity.

You can read it.

Neither Xu’s nor Ota’s writing systems are really asemic though since they do convey a specific semantic meaning. (Xu’s work is sometimes purely asemic, but that one example above isn’t.) In fact, you could argue that Ota’s wish for a universal visual communication system is the opposite of Michaux’s, Twombly’s, or Ferrari’s cryptic, personal scribbling. But all of them share a desire and a capacity to change language through form and that’s what interests me in their works. So while Turner describes Ota’s belief in the “power of symbolic communication” as “romantic,” what I have found in studying the work of anti-writing artists is that Ota is only romantic perhaps in believing that others would join him in adopting his system but that his work is otherwise no more romantic than Ferrari’s or Xu’s.