The Untamed Type

What happens when you let a living organism design type?

The Untamed Typography started from my own curiosity and experimentation with Slime Mold (Physarum polycephalum) and was made as part of my ongoing research into working with living systems in the typography/graphic design context.

This typography is a result of half a year spent getting to know the organism, figuring out what it likes, what it avoids, and learning to grow empathy towards it. The idea was to create a full font, grown letter by letter in petri dishes.

The letters were grown using oats as food, placed in letter shapes. I documented the process by taking over 600 photos during a one month period. From these, I selected the most legible moments of each letter and created type.

At first, I thought I could shape oats into letters and the organism would just follow. But that wasn’t the case. It became more of a negotiation between me trying to guide it, and it doing its own thing. Even if I could anticipate some movements, the final outcomes were unpredictable.

I show the letters I managed to “grow.” I picked the moments where the shapes most closely resembled actual letterforms, and used those as the basis. The type plays with this tension between legibility and chaos, between system and organism. The point was to showcase the letterforms not as fixed, polished results, but as living experiments as appreciation for the process and the organism itself.