An Opera for Animals, at Para Site in Hong Kong in 2019, examined the elaborate business of staging a world. Western opera’s ambition to organize an entire spectacle was bound up with Europe’s colonial ambition to organize everyone else. This was supposedly a modern, rational enterprise. The opera houses were nevertheless full of phantoms, monsters, and sacred animals. The exhibition followed those contradictions into digital worlds, artificial landscapes, and the prospect of new forms of intelligence.

The identity, developed with Wkshps, begins with an OCR-inspired typeface from the early days of grunge typography. The lettering approaches the exhibition’s questions through a fairly simple operation: pull the letters tall enough and unfamiliar creatures start to appear. Mechanical forms begin to suggest organic life—curves that could be winding bodies, strokes that seem to have grown tails.

The modified lettering carries the exhibition title, artists’ names, and biographical information. On the printed cover, it shares space with a painted creature with orange fur, green eyes, and bared teeth. By comparison, the alphabet looks reasonably well behaved.