When Language Becomes Art

Faculty uses AI and machine learning to create a universal pictographic human language.

Can humans communicate through a single unified language? 

Yes, according to Haytham Nawar, associate professor and chair of the Department of the Arts, who is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop a universal pictographic language that could bridge divides and enhance cross-cultural understanding.

Why pictographic? 

“The idea is that the machine creates a new language based on how humans in the past created pictographic languages, starting from hieroglyphics all the way to emojis,” said Nawar, who has long been interested in scripts and pictographic languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform scripts used in the Near East and ancient Chinese writing systems. These image-based languages were humanity’s earliest communication systems, the precursors to the script-based languages we use today.

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