Writing against text recognition

Workshop proposal by Ema

In one sentence:

Collectively develop an handwriting that can be read by humans and not by OCR technologies (Optical Character Recognition).

(this title of this page is NOT the title of the workshop. It's just a draft for now)

Idea

The idea comes from the unreadability of graffiti tags. Those signs in the urban environment are very difficult or almost impossible to read by many. The only ones that usually can read those glyphs are other graffiti writers, people that are already part of that bubble. Hiding in plain sight, those letters, those signatures, those names that surrounds us all over, incoherently are actually readable (NOT recognisable) by an handful of people.

Tags and graffiti are based onto the development of letters. The development of an hand-style is at the core of the graffiti practice. Letters do not pretend to be perfect and clonable as like a font. When coming to tagging, they have to be fast to be written. Exactly like our very own calligraphy, graffiti writers develops their very own calligraphy using the same letters of our common alphabet.

So why aren't we able to read them? Why don't we develop our

Unlike this communal aspect of calligraphy being tied to ourselves, how we normally write can be now a day easily be scanned and recognised by an image recognition algorithm (commonly known as OCR - see more: https://cloud.google.com/use-cases/ocr + https://docs.cloud.google.com/document-ai/docs/ce-with-genai).

By personal experience, i noticed that Generative Algorithms really struggles to create graffiti. This is because this kind of AI is trained on images thus do not understand that besides the aesthetic of graffiti, there is the letter aspect to it. AI mimics graffiti in a very gibberish sense. Probably most of us still recognise them as graffiti, but actually those are not graffiti at all cause they does not work by dealing with letters. Letters are actually non-existent in AI Generated Images.

Thanks to that I came across the realisation that graffiti are not only un-graspable by humans but also by algorithms.

To develop a character set --a font-- is useless to the objectives of this workshop, cause a font is just a graphic look of a letter, an overlay layer to a character. Behind it there's always the correspondence to a specific Unicode character. When highlighted and copied, a digital text written on a computer, does not take into account the appearance of it. Every letter is natively encoded into the Unicode characters set, so for instance to develop a font, will be just useless cause the machine can still perfectly read what's written, no matter how complicated it looks.

By using major softwares to write, it might be very common that those tools have embedded in them a thingy to store & collect our texts to train an AI. Even when we take a photo of an handwritten text to not retype it, it will be probably fed into the machine and used to better train itself.

In this workshop we'll:

- Learn how to read graffiti + share our personal experiences of trying to read them and how thanks to that struggle, they became unnoticed to us, even though they surround us.

- Learn how OCR works + share personal experiences in using such tools. What are the pros and flaws that we've encountered.

- Share why we would want to be unrecognisable by technologies and how it can be useful to us

- Develop an handwritten alphabet that we can all read, but those algorithms not.

How do we test this? By simply using our phones and the apps that we have on them. They can be documents scanners, google lens, etc.

We do not have to develop something super complicated.

Success will be achieved when none of the apps that we have on our phones, can't read the messages that we wrote.

The development of this will imply to share between us messages, not signatures like graffiti tags. The hand-style has to be useful and has to be easily writeable. We are not developing something like calligraphy but an hand-style, a way of writing, so it doesn't have to take 5 minutes to write a sentence.

Expected duration of the workshop: 2 hours

Hypothesis of places:

- 1st: Somewhere where it can be useful in a political sense. Maybe something like an anarchist collective place.

For example:

- Catu - a squatted community center in Rotterdam South

- (i MIGHT know a place in Amsterdam)

- Frida snack bar. A squatted bar in Delfshaven

- Weggeefwinkel - A place in which everything is given away for free. They also organise exhibitions, concerts and performances. Very sociable place and based on sharing with people.

- Het Archief - artists studios in Rotterdam west (i'm not part of that. I just know a guy in there)

- Robin's studio (just cause they offered)

- Leeszaal Lees - A Library in Rotterdam.