What might happen if the division between looking at art and reading literature began to disappear?
The Chimeric Protocols of Transmutation / The Book of Split Ink proposes one possible answer. Its images are not illustrations added to a narrative after the fact, and its narrative is not simply an explanation of the images. Instead, visual structure and literary experience operate together. The Protocols encode transformation through glyphs, pathways, relationships and symbolic fields, while The Book of Split Ink turns those structures into memory, body, consciousness and lived experience.
The companion manual makes the ambition explicit: the Chimeric Glyphic System is conceived as a space between visual art and literature—a language in which an image can be read, a sentence can be seen, a narrative navigated and a composition made to behave more like thought.
If this approach were taken further by other artists and writers, it could contribute to a new kind of diagrammatic literature.
The important difference from the traditional illustrated book would be structural. In an illustrated novel, the image usually depicts something already contained in the prose. In a chimeric work, the visual field contains information that prose alone does not reproduce. Position, scale, direction, enclosure, repetition and connection become grammatical elements. The reader therefore has to learn not merely to look at an image but to read relationships inside it.
That could have interesting consequences for both literature and visual art.
For writers, it opens the possibility of constructing narratives that do not have to unfold entirely in linear sequence. Memory, simultaneity, recursion, competing possibilities, networks and transformation could exist spatially on the page rather than having to be described sentence after sentence.
For visual artists, the opposite movement becomes possible. An image can acquire something resembling syntax. A symbol no longer needs to stand alone as an emblem; it can enter pathways, hierarchies, cycles and contextual relationships that make the composition behave almost like a sentence. In the CGS, meaning is explicitly relational: glyphs provide symbolic fields, pathways establish movement and exchange, while context changes hierarchy and interpretation.
But perhaps the greatest change would concern the reader—or art lover.
The audience would no longer be asked simply to receive a completed work. The reader would become an active interpreter moving between image and text, intuition and analysis, first impressions and repeated encounters. The CGS already proposes radial, linear, relational and recursive reading modes, including the important idea that a reader should return to an earlier image after later relationships have changed its meaning.
For an art lover, this could make reading feel closer to wandering through an exhibition. One might pause before a plate, discover a detail, move into the narrative, consult another symbolic layer, then return and suddenly perceive the original image differently.
For a literary reader, the page could become less like a line to be followed and more like a space to be inhabited.
If a broader movement grew from this idea, its most significant contribution might therefore be neither a new illustration style nor a new literary genre. It could be a new contract between artwork and audience.
The artwork would provide the field.
The text would provide movement through it.
And the reader would provide the final relation that allows meaning to emerge.
Perhaps the future book will not always ask simply: What happens next?
It may also ask:
Where do you look next—and what changed because you looked again?
English edition: Vyaas, Shaharee. The Chimera Protocols of Transmutation. 254 pages, standard color. Independently Published, September 15, 2026. ISBN 9798255835324. Price: €29.99.
Edición española: Vyaas, Shaharee. Los protocolos quiméricos de transmutación y El libro de la tinta dividida. 254 páginas, color estándar. Publicación: 15 de septiembre de 2026. ISBN 978-84-09-88086-7. Precio: €29,99.
