The World with "Formatting" Turned "On"

Back when word processors were just beginning to be WYSIWYG, there was a setting where you could make the software reveal all the formatting characters. Those are the normally invisible symbols within the document that cause paragraphs, indents, bullets, font changes, color changes, bold “on” and bold “off”, etc.

I think the universe as we perceive it is like a WYSIWYG view of a document or a web page. There are forces and influences and even beings that we can’t sense, because we’ve learned to filter all that out (to make sense of things) or because our senses can’t detect them. Sometimes I fantasize what the “Formatting On” setting might look like for the world around us, and I wonder what it would be like to draw that. This is an example.

11 x 14 - ink and pencils on sketchbook paper