'Unicode' presents a macroscopic view of human language in a single graphical composition, aggregating over 100,000 glyphs.

The piece is concerned with how humans and machines encode the world. 'Unicode' is a portrait of The Unicode Standard - the universal digital representation of text used internally by computers. This digital encoding exists as a second tier 'machine' encoding layered upon language itself.

'Unicode' presents characters in their byte encoded order, its visual arrangement dictated by the manner in which computers store language in digital memory. The piece draws attention to how the act of digital encoding can itself produce novel articulations of culture.

A reduced size version of the full graphic can be viewed here.