Shifting Signage

In the small hours the signs along the street will now and then "flicker" — Cosmed, a convenience store, a few familiar characters turning within 4 seconds into another kind of block character nobody can read, and then turning back.

Three locations have been recorded, all of them from a car, all of them caught in the corner of the eye. On a stretch of the Huanhe Expressway in New Taipei, at 80 kilometres an hour, the four characters on a bubble tea shop's sign couldn't be read; closed to 50 metres, they had turned back into "pearl black tea." On Zhongxiao East Road Section 4, past the Bade Road intersection, at 02:46:00 the orange sign of a chain pharmacy changed into two block characters, and at 02:46:04 changed back. On a narrow street in Neihu, at 03:16:42 the red sign of a convenience store had two characters swapped out, and at 03:16:46 they came back. On the nights spent parked at the kerb on purpose, watching, a sign was a sign.

Those characters have the stroke density and the left-and-right arrangement of Chinese characters, and yet belong to no system that can be looked up. Screenshots put to Google Lens, Microsoft Translate, Baidu image search, DeepL, Youdao, Yandex and Naver — 7 cross-border recognition platforms — came back with "Detected language: undefined," "no results," "this image is not currently supported," and blankness.

A friend who has worked on artefact authentication for 8 years looked at 4 static screenshots and said they don't look like Chinese characters, and don't look like the Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Thai systems she knows, or the Arabic and Southeast Asian ones; she has seen samples of constructed scripts like Klingon and Tolkien's, and they don't look much like those either. Where she is least comfortable is the characters' centre of gravity: the weight distribution looks machine-equidistant, like the inertia you get when nobody is writing. But she stressed that 4 characters is too small a sample, that a variant of any system can't be categorically ruled out, and that stroke order, the start of a stroke and the finish need dynamic frames before they can be confirmed.

The people who see them, though, say they "know what they mean" — the pharmacy's set felt like it was saying "a tonic for people who are tired," the convenience store's like "a supply post in the night." Close your eyes and think about the shapes of those characters and the shapes go soft; set them down from memory and the first attempt comes out as a circle with a horizontal stroke, the second a lopsided circle with three lines, the third something like a clump of cloud.