“At the age of seven,” French calligrapher Julien Breton says, “calligraphy imposed itself on, interfered with, my life.” His style, which he calls “Arabisant,” is a pastiche of Arabic and Persian forms fused with a graffiti artist’s insouciant grasp of the Roman alphabet. Breton speaks no Arabic, and his texts, taken from hip-hop lyrics, are in French. In this video he demonstrates a motion-and-light capture system for devising “virtual calligraphy.” Light and urban space finding rhythm in the swerve of brush—there’s a fresh kind of materiality at work in Breton’s renewal of this ancient art form.
