Glyphlora by Jane Lee is a series of immersive sound performances and installation works. Jane started her early career in Seoul as a graphic designer included founding and leading the non-profit, democratic typography club Scientific Font Lab, reflecting her deep engagement with type and visual language. These interests naturally continued into her master’s studies, where she explored CJK typography from new perspectives. After moving to London, she reinterpreted these explorations through lenses of posthumanism and speculative design.
London’s vibrant music scene also provided Jane with significant inspiration. Audio visualisation and audio programming became ideal tools for translating non-human forms of communication. Her research into typography has always been informed by the discourse surrounding minority languages. For Jane, the often-overlooked CJK typographic context offered a critical entry point. She expanded this thinking further beyond minority groups to non-human species—challenging anthropocentric boundaries in typography.
Jane’s research led her to a Nature study revealing that plants emit supersonic sounds when under stress. This discovery sparked her imagination: plants communicate in ways inaudible to humans, yet these supersonic patterns resembled the phonics of human language. Inspired, Jane began designing glyphs for a speculative alphabet of non-human languages. This experimental process merged graphic design, technology, and sound in a multimedia approach. Drawing from historical precedents like Hangul—which abstracts vocal organs into geometric forms—Jane explored how humans perceive sound visually. Experiments showing participants’ intuitive recognition of unfamiliar phonetic symbols further informed her work, raising questions about arbitrariness in language.
The glyphs Jane created were translated into typefaces, but she sought a more tangible, performative form. Mirroring the origins of human writing on stone tablets, she produced speculative stone tablets for these glyphs, imagining them as artifacts that might be discovered in the distant future. Glyphlora debuted at New Designers in July at the Business Design Centre. Complementing the exhibition, Jane hosted the workshop Glyph Yourself!, inviting participants to reimagine glyphs as living, performative visual languages. Through body movement and collaborative exploration, participants engaged with language from a posthumanist perspective, transcending human-centered communication. Each glyph was archived and printed immediately in a collective zine, reflecting the DIY, participatory spirit of zine culture. This first issue of Scientific Font Lab’s magazine was recently shortlisted for Award360, with the final results pending.
Through Glyphlora, Jane Lee advances critical and symbiotic approaches to typography, proposing new discourses and multimedia experimentation. She plans to continue developing this work into installations and audiovisual performances, challenging fundamental questions about language, sound, and meaning. It dissolves the boundaries between human and non-human, language and sound, visual and auditory, offering a glimpse into new possibilities for communication in the posthuman era. Jane Lee continues to expand the project into audiovisual performances and sound installations, probing the forms and meanings of language in radical, speculative ways.
The plant-emitted sounds are translated into frequencies perceptible to humans and utilised Plugdata alongside JavaScript to create audio visualisations, refining a method for the visual interpretation of acoustic data. The resulting algorithmically generated glyphs were subsequently 3D printed, materialising them as tangible artefacts.
Project Page | Jane Lee | Instagram
