Charles Sandison

For Systematic, Sandison has developed two existing works, adapting them for the idiosyncratic architecture of 176. In Reading Glass, the full stops of a text emerge from the flaws and irregularities of the room and come together to form the words of Charles Darwin’s On theOrigin of Species (1859). Their behavior mimics that of bacteria, coming together, reproducing and dying out, as they spell one word after another, eventually running through Darwin’s entire text. The design of the letters is based on handwriting samples from Sandison’s daughter at the time when she was learning to write.The Blind Watchmaker borrows its title from a computer program developed by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1986, which was a prototype for the tools used by the police to construct portraits of missing people. The program analyses photographs to predict the way an individual would look at a later age.