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Fred Benenson, .notyetdef (2019)

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Stewarded Collection: a2p, Fall 2019
full screen
Medium

Image

Edition

Edition of 10

Created

2019

Issued

11 October 2019 on Bitmark, asset 25afff61276e…

Provenance

Re-minted on Ethereum in 2025 as a2p-v1: 11 of 11 editions (contract)

Stewarded Collection
Released by

a2p

Blockchain

ethereum (migrated from Bitmark)

What would it look like if a computer invented an alphabet? .notyetdef, a collaboration between Fred Benenson and Tyler Shoemaker, uses AI to probe the limits of Unicode’s 137,993 assigned codepoints – individual addresses that carry the information needed to render everything from the letter “A” to 😍. But no one font can render all of Unicode, making the entire database nearly impossible to holistically reckon with, even for computers. This is Unicode’s paradox, a conflict that signals a folly at the heart of the standard: the impossible pursuit of distilling all human writing into one system. This folly is most evident in .notdef characters, such as � or □, mysterious glyphs that appear when software can't find the right character to write. .notyetdef offers a new set of undefined glyphs. Conjured from a custom generative adversarial network trained on vast quantities of Unicode glyphs, the result is a familiar yet confusing grid of glyphs designed purely by a machine.

Editions, as the exchange left them on the Bitmark chain

  • AP Fred Benenson
  • 1/10 Tabor Robak
  • 2/10 Zack Dougherty
  • 3/10 Tom Galle
  • 4/10 Daniel Temkin
  • 5/10 Gelare Khoshgozaran
  • 6/10 Ursula Endlicher
  • 7/10 Sara Drake & Nina Sarnelle
  • 8/10 Maral Pourkazemi
  • 9/10 Fred Benenson
  • 10/10 Michael Mandiberg
.notyetdef by Fred Benenson