Images are fast replacing words in our daily conversations. We speak in emojis and memes, and our love for image-driven social media, such as Instagram and Snapchat, point to the inadequacy of the written word in our increasingly visual world today. Faced with an information overload, reading texts is seen as too tiring—a process of analysis that is too slow, static, and simply out of sync with the times.

Through typography, Matthias Hillner has been exploring ways to revitalise the written word through design. His series of prints, sculptures and digital installations are “typographic gestures” that sit in-between image and text, abstract and figure, as well as real and virtual. They can be seen, could be read, may be understood and certainly questioned. They are words, and they are not.