The term typographic fiction comes from Eric Brandt’s Garage wall poster project ‘Ficciones Typografika’; which is really a 24”x36” wooden exhibition space that where typographers and graphic designers can produce one-off experiments as posters that are wheat-pasted onto that wooden board. Brandt in an interview (2014) with the Medium explains what ‘typographic fictions’ are. He points to two tattoos, one on each forearm. With the weight and structure of letterforms, they appear to be typography, but the forms are not actually from our alphabet. They’re reproductions of experiments he did years ago with Letraset, sheets of waxy paper filled with lettering that can be dry-transferred to paper. He created them by overlaying letters from the typeface Microgramma, and they were featured on his first two installations for Ficciones Typografika. “These forms are completely fictional,” he says. “They may look like a language — that’s OK with me — but I’m more interested in the form, its dynamic and how you’re pushing the edge of the paper or challenging the oblique — these kinds of formal concerns.”
Coming back to the question of what would happen to a letter when pushed to a point of illegibility and building on Brandt’s idea of typographic fictions, letterforms transcend the boundaries of legibility and enter a fictional space. In this space, a letterform is devoid of all meaning and continues to float there—in all of its existential dread— waiting to attach itself to new meaning. To me, these fictional spaces are areas where the type (letterforms) continue to exist and perform new functions. They are no longer bound to their phonetic value. They become symbols with some semblance of their past life—they exist between the old and the new, the known and the unknown—but themselves have no memory of it.