User:Budrus/Atrium alphabet

Atrium alphabet is an artistic concept designed by the Russian artists Sergey de Rocambole and Anna Nikolaeva in 1987.

Name
The concept has been called after the lat. atrium 'inner yard' - the open space that unites the surrounding premices and has no upper-limits.

Structure
The Atrium alphabet comprises 256 figures. Each figure has four vertically arranged lines of dots (from one to four). This conventional graphic shape of the figures can be regularly represented as mosaics elements of sound patterns.

Concept
The concept of the Atrium alphabet is related to that of I Ching, Geomancy, and Ifá. However, it has been designed as an artictic rather than divination tool. The signes have been intendedly deprived of any prescribed meanings. Their four constitutive elements can be artitrarily assigned to the four natural elements, coordinates, logical propositions, colors, tunes etc. The Atrium alphabet is an artistic responce to the Chaos Theory and the theory of fractals applied to the concept design.

History
The attempts of the Russian constructivists to design a universal language of artistic expressions had come to decline in the mid-20th century. This challange had been addressed again in a series of works by Sergey de Rocambole and Anna Nikolaeva. In 1986, during the first non-comunist City Holiday of Saint Petersburg (than Leningrad), Sergey de Rocambole created a modular system of 343 carnaval costumes. Taken all together they formed a coherent whole, however each single costume was unique and preserved information about the others. This principle of a conceptual hologramm was further extended to a universal artistic metacode, the Atrium alphabet invented in 1987.

Exhibitions
Tokio Nagano Saint Petersburg Moscow