Processes of emergence and disappearance, intentional or unintentional, of graphical form out of matter, with our attention caught by the material forms that letters and words themselves may take. Thresholds of sense and meaning, as a message seems to emerge from background noise. Marginal states, as anthropomorphic form seems to emerge from faecal forms carved in marble.

This fundamental feature of Nobson is hylography.

Hyle is Aristotle’s word for matter and is typically associated with morphe — the form that matter takes. Hylography is the entanglement of matter and making, matter and making sense, writing, mark making, representation, signification.

In Quarry words seem to grow out of the living rock. The letter forms of Nobson Central are weathered and ruined and appear to have lost all form … but not quite. The clouds in Acumulus Nobilitatus seem take the form of a creatures. Hylography is this emergence of a signal, sense or meaning from background noise, the distinction between figure and ground.

Nobson turns this relationship between form and matter and meaning into an architectural, indeed an existential principle, as letters and words appear to be the very foundation of Nobson, as letter and word slide between meaning and their material substance. Consider how letters, words, graphical marks, visual and material forms may connect with meaning.

An icon is a sign that is linked to its represented object by some shared quality. A statue in Nobson may look like a person.

An index is a sign that is linked to its object by an actual connection or real relation (irrespectively of interpretation). A finger points; the smoke rises over a barbecue in Nobpark and tells us it is still working.

A symbol represents its denoted object by virtue of an interpretive habit or rule that is independent of any shared physical quality or contextual relationship with that which it denotes. The written word, sound, the drawn form of a “stone” has no intrinsic relation to any actual stone or to the substance.