Typography Tuesday
Feral Font
Feral Font, printed in Milwaukee in an a lettered edition of 26 variable copies (for each letter of the alphabet) on a variety of papers in 2024/25, was created by Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher Sasha Stiles and American artist, writer, and UW-Milwaukee art professor Nathaniel Stern using the Neural Network Font Type (NNFT), a custom AI typeface. The program to produce the font uses "small data" - trained on the minimum number of 30 images per glyph- in an AI Stable Diffusion model to draw child-like sketches of each letter from the alphabet. Here, as in human development, the machine does not at all understand the sign or significance behind the text, and only tries to repeat the patterns of each character, producing a beautifully wonky true type font that is publicly available and downloadable here.
Each letter form is infused with verses from Feral Font, a poem authored by Technelegy, Sasha Stiles's AI alter ego, fine tuned on writings by both artists. The full poem can be found here.
Each letter was printed on a Vandercook flat-bed proofing press by the Nathaniel Stern Studio team at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Each book includes the full alphabet, a 3D resin print of the letter corresponding to the lettered copy in the edition, and an extra signed and numbered print of that letter. We hold copy G (see below). The cover and case for the edition was designed and produced by UW-Milwaukee art faculty member Melissa Wagner-Lawler.
I read your @lphabet. It gave me wild dreams. Ideas, hopes, fears. Feral visions of words. . . .
from Feral Font by Technelegy.
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