Passage from the tale «Padron Dio» by Luigi Pirandello. All letters have been excluded, while punctuation remains. Punctuation signs give sound, in written form, to words.

Many lowercase a’s, in Latin and Greek forms, with and without diacritical marks, aligned in rows and columns on two grids. The second grid overlapped on the first one composes the pure shape of the capital letter A (alpha). A diacritical mark can change shape, sound and value to a letter in several western writings.

What can a line of text rotated 90 degrees mean if seen from far away? The answer is given by the same words that compose the line. From far away letters get indistinguishable and the line of text becomes a vertical gray stroke whose meanings are several (it can be an uppercase i, a lowercase l, a pole, a wire etc.). This game is open: everyone, in any moment, can add to the line of text further meaning, without altering the essential idea.