A grapheme is the smallest semantically distinguishing unit in a written language, analogous to the phonemes of spoken languages. A grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, and may or may not correspond to a single phoneme. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems.

The word grapheme is derived from Greek γράφω gráphō ("write"), and the suffix -eme, by analogy with phoneme and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called graphemics.

Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩, etc. This is analogous to the slash notation (/a/, /b/) used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for phonetic transcriptions ([a], [b]).

In the same way that the surface forms of phonemes are speech sounds or phones (and different phones representing the same phoneme are called allophones), the surface forms of graphemes are glyphs (sometimes "graphs"), namely concrete written representations of symbols, and different glyphs representing the same grapheme are called allographs. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all semantically equivalent.

PHASE 2 (aka Lonny Wood) is one of the most influential and well known New York City aerosol artists. Mostly active in the 1970s, Phase 2 is generally credited with originating the "bubble letter" style of aerosol writing, also known as "softies". He was also influential in the early hip-hop scene.

Phase 2 is from The Bronx, and attended DeWitt Clinton High School along with a number of other early graffiti artists. Many famous graffiti writers of the early 1970s would meet at a doughnut shop across from the school called the Coffee Shop before heading down to the subway station at 149th Street and Grand Concourse to watch tagged trains on the IRT line pass by. Phase 2 was mentored in graffiti by his friend and neighbor Thomas Lee aka Lee 163d!, one of the pioneers of graf writing in The Bronx.

He began writing in late 1971 under the name Phase 2, a moniker which had a rather mundane provenance. As Phase 2 would later recall, "the previous year we'd given this party. We were getting ready to give another one and I said, 'We'll call this one Phase Two.' I don't know why, but I was stuck on the name. It had meaning for me. I started writing 'Phase 2.'"

Paul D. Miller (born 1970), known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author. He borrowed his stage name from the character The Subliminal Kid in the novel Nova Express by William S. Burroughs. He is a Professor of Music Mediated Art at the European Graduate School.

Miller grew up in Washington DC and attended Woodrow Wilson High School and Sidwell Friends High School. His father, Paul E. Miller, was Dean of Howard University Law School, and his mother, Rosemary E. Reed Miller, owned Toast and Strawberries, a legendary boutique in Washington DC. She is the author of Threads of Time, a history of African American women designers. Spooky became interested in punk and go-go music. He attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, earning degrees in French literature and philosophy.