What if the act of writing could reconnect us, not only to language, but to each other? In Proto-Futura, visual artist Rob Stolte delves into the deep roots and speculative futures of script. The project begins not with the future, but with the past: the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Desert, where over three millennia ago, nomadic workers carved proto-alphabetic signs into stone. These were no abstract symbols; they were reflections of cultural artefacts: an ox head for provision, a house for shelter. Over time, these images evolved into the first letters of our alphabet: A, B, and beyond.

As writing adapted to new technologies and shifting societies, it grew more abstract; efficient, but increasingly written away from the world it once mirrored. Proto-Futura asks: can we reimagine script not as a fixed system, but as a living, cultural practice? Might we re-examine the alphabet, not to perfect it, but to feel it again?

In a contemporary gesture of excavation, Stolte opens a new kind of mine; one not of minerals, but of meanings. Within a spatial and tactile installation, visitors carve intuitive signs into the surface, freed from the constraints of known letters. Each mark becomes part of an emergent visual language: one born of the present moment, responsive to today's cultural pulse.

Through an speculative–archaeological lens, the project explores how embodied, inclusive scripts might better reflect the diversity of cognition and communication. It gestures toward alternatives for those who experience written language differently, such as those with dyslexia, by restoring a direct, sensory relationship between sound and sign. The script becomes a site of negotiation between biological evolution and the technologically mediated future of literacy.

Stolte systematically documents this process: mapping, categorizing, and interpreting the newly born symbols. What emerges is not a new alphabet, but a growing archive: a living collection of semiotic gestures that reflect how we wish to make meaning today. Proto-Futura operates at the intersection of the archaic and the arcadian, of ritual and representation. It proposes a shift from writing as a tool of standardization, to writing as a space of connection.

This project invites us to consider script not as something we inherit, but as something we can shape, and be shaped by.