The research did not begin with sensors or computation, but with a much simpler object: a lettering guide.

A lettering guide appears to be a straightforward analogue tool. A hand moves a pen or pencil through a predetermined opening, producing a letterform. Yet this simple action already complicates the relationship between intention and execution. The hand determines pressure, speed and direction, but the tool constrains where that hand can move. The resulting form belongs neither entirely to the person nor entirely to the object; it emerges through their interaction.

This became particularly apparent during an encounter with an archive of historical lettering tools. Among them was a device designed, according to its description, to generate the complete Latin alphabet and its accented variations. What interested me was not simply its efficiency, but the amount of decision-making already contained within its construction. Before anyone picked it up, someone had determined which forms were possible, how the hand should move, and what kinds of variation the mechanism would allow.
The tool therefore did not simply execute an intention that already existed. It participated in determining how that intention could become form.

I encountered de Plaque Découpée Universelle on Palace of Typographic Masonry.

I was fascinated by the ambition of fitting so many possible forms into one object. A lettering guide is an ordinary object. You place it on paper, put a pen or pencil into one of its openings, and follow the edge until a letter appears. The hand seems to be doing the drawing, but it cannot move wherever it wants. The guide has already decided something about the movement: where the line can go, where it has to turn, what kind of form can emerge.

So who is drawing the letter?