Words from the Ether
Two years ago, in the summer of 2018, my then-friend and now partner introduced me to the concept of asemic writing. If you aren't familiar with the term, it is the term given to what appears to be but is not actually writing. It is meaningless, but looks as if it is meaningful. At some point during that summer after hearing about that, I had the idea to try to find "asemic writing"-appearing things in my everyday environments and objects, and see whether the Google Translate camera translation feature could find words in them. I chose languages such as French and Chinese to translate from, and chose English as the language to translate to. The results are both amusingly absurd and, in another way, unsettling. It is as if there are messages all around us from the beyond that we cannot see. Here are the pictures I took, roughly from least to most unnerving: