Text/image Conjunctions: On The Path to Embodied Letterforms

Text/image Conjunctions: On The Path to Embodied Letterforms

Francisco J. Ricardo (Literary Art in Digital Performance. pg. 1)

No process is immediate; few assimilations are total. However, in some digital environments, images are in the process of assimilating text⁰. As with social assimilations, this abstract assimilation is not without controversy. The normal popular view is that words and images are distinct and should remain that way. This view is easily found; a typical example is expressed in the Nov. 18^th 2010 London Review of Books by Peter Campbell “… images tend to drown out words. Why not let them? Well, words and images need different kinds of attention. Words tend to reduce pictures to illustrations, pictures to reduce texts to captions” (LBR, 18/11/2010, p. 17).In this view, conjunctions lead to reductions, disruptions and ruptures in concentrative force.

Where purists see antagonistic competition, I see opportunities for synergy: combined word, sound and image creating greater throughput. Motion graphics in advertising demonstrate this potential clearly (as discussed in my Master’s thesis and elsewhere in this thesis).Motion graphics are also (on youtube and vimeo posted as responses in on-going) visual conversations. In motion graphics, images inhabit semantic spaces where words previously took precedence. Everyone with a TV is motion graphics literate; videos are read; they connect to each other within a recursive syntactical culture. Cameras are the new pen; video-editors are the scribes.

Instead of trying to battle the advocates of image-text segregation head-on, I will offer a history of image-text evolution⁰. It offers a proof by continuity that text is being assimilated into imagery, reading is fusing with viewing, and that synaesthesia may become as normal as literacy. If we assume evolution tends toward optimization, this suggests that image-texts are more potent (as visual-literature) than text or image alone. And it is not a sterilized monoculture of corporate creativity that will ensure all text corresponds to imagistic protocols. Instead it is as Manovich states, that the ensuing result of convergence or assimilation (or whatever terminology is used⁰) will be “—more species rather than less” (184) -- divergence.

It is not that text is eradicated as a simple 2D monochromatic entity, instead it is that print in static form becomes part of a larger continuum, an explosive gathering of text-image-audio tavit entities that arise at the confluence of hybrid media and increased computational power. And these tavits, instead of being at the periphery of culture, will be at the centre in ads, film credits, music videos, experimental videos and other pop culture.

Visual poetry in this evolving ecosystem is just one species among many that is being digitized. As Christopher Funkhouser wrote in 2007: “Poetry as it is known historically will never completely change into a digital form; it will continue to exist as it has – as myriad spoken, written, and other textual formulations alongside computerized counterparts” (251).

There are several ways image/texts occur on the path toward the assimilation of text by image. The first and simplest is a label or caption. On the cave wall, there is a scratched glyph near a smeared figure. Both picture and text inhabit distinct worlds. There is no visual overlap. Reading and viewing are activated separately. But already there is a symbiosis. As reading-viewing oscillate a meaning emerges that is the product of the two activities.

Figure : Text Overlay Example (created by author)

The next step in the evolution of text-image toward symbiotic fusion is popularly referred to as word-art⁰. When text as image discards the image entirely by becoming it, representative or mimetic functions are subsumed by the placement of words. Apollinaire is the obvious progenitor of this branch. His calligrames precipitate concrete poetry up into language sculpture. Steve McCaffery exemplified this tradition in Canada in the 1960s with an art-brut intellectual perspective. And idiosyncratic commercial-art practitioner Robert Bowen TextScapes uses a similar approach when he wraps landscapes in text. Camille Utterback’s iconic TextRain is another example of “that tradition where the text is the image and vice versa, so that neither is fully itself autonomously, separately, individually” (Ricardo, pg. 76).

It is intriguing to note how Francisco Ricardo opens his treatment of TextRain by examining how the advocates of ‘pure literature’ exiled images from literary texts; the expulsion used a litany of doctrinal objections against the integration of imagistic content perceived as hostile to literature’s essence (pg 54-56). Against such critiques, Ricardo explores how the effect of TextRain is “transmodal, a recursive amalgam of filmic, literary, performative and near-sculptural conditions”(60). It is within the ideologically hostile environment outlined by Ricardo that text and image establish illicit yet fertile contact. With digital imaging techniques, the porosity between text and image increases.

Eventually, after some time as with most couples, they move in together. In the previous case of text-as-image, text imagined itself as image; in the next case, text inhabits image and the idea of image-as-habitat emerges. Text sits on top of image, still occluding it perhaps, but it has left behind its clothing (the page). This is the first evolutionary contact between text/image; they now inhabit the same field. Each remains distinct; they are like shy strangers at a party standing in proximal intimacy but not speaking much to each other. Many ads use this formula. A photo with a logo superimposed.

In other cases, text begins to assume qualities of the image. The font will be chosen to reflect the scene; the predominant colour of the image may be inverted and assigned as font colour; the text position may be set to correspond with a sharp edge, a horizon or table. Essentially a process of assimilation occurs through concessions as features associated with things are implemented textually.

Figure : Utterback, Wardrip-Fruin et al.Talking Cure. (2002).

So what is assimilation? Does it occur when the oscillatory fluctuations between reading and viewing occur so swiftly that they are quantitatively imperceptible (merging into apparent concurrency)? Is there a cognitive mode that occurs when text/image is read in parallel, when the impact of visual and verbal wash up on the shore of consciousness simultaneously? Metaphors are necessitated because there is no neurological lab or equipment capable of measuring the subtle flux and flow of meanings that arise and subside as the eyes wander, saccade, absorb focally and peripherally, both text and imagistic data.

Figure : André Vallias. Nous n`avons pas compris Descartes. (1990).

Both the body and substrate emerge in experiments in 3D poetic language conducted by pioneers such as Eduardo Kac and André Vallias. Kac`s OCO (1985/90. In Kac pg. 53) is a rough set of donut-style letterforms: O-C-O forming a cylinder. No textures, no phong or raytracing, not much by contemporary CGI standards, but a step toward the development of a dimensional body for letterform in literary milieu. Vallias’ Nous n`avons pas compris Descartes(1990.In Kac. pg. 88) does something he perhaps had not intended, it translates Olson’s field theory into 3D form, while The Verse (1991. In Kac p. 88) introduces poetic meter rendered in wireframe. The Verse looks like an information visualization of a poet’s breath, a spoken word oscilloscope. So the body and territory (the tav and tavt) converge at the point where it is the body that produces the form on which the words rest, so even in their absence something is spoken.

2.3.5Visual Language: Volumetric and Situated

"…visual form does something, rather than that it is something."

Johanna Drucker (SpecLab. Pg.75, emphasis in original).

Consider text on a flat page. If printed on a press, the text is indented almost imperceptibly. The ink has bonded with the paper, the fibres of the paper have soaked up the stain of the letter, paper and letter are materially bonded, melded together. On screens, there is no indentation of ink into paper. Pixels portray depth through a luminous two-dimensional perspectival grid. Nonetheless, due to the persistence of iconographic traditions of print, most digital text appears as if printed. To a casual eye, the similarities between the trace mark-making of petroglyphs, papyrus, hieroglyphs, and screen-based digital typography are strong. Line based, left to right reading, columns with headlines, formatting (upper case, sentences, underlines, italics and justification): these formal elements of writing persevere through technologies. Writing remains what it always was, a reservoir of prescriptive grammatical rules, typographic traditions, and literary effects. There are few attempts to make strange⁰with what is overly familiar.

Now imagine blisters arising in the form of letters on the printed page. The dormant immobile ink of each letter bubbles upward just slightly. The indentation of the printing press is inverted. The letters hover like pimples, swollen with ink, foaming over. They shine as if plastic; they gleam as if wet. The page is now implicitly tactile. It references Braille. It is now possible to conceive of someone touching the page and slowly (laboriously) reading it with their fingers. Unfortunately, if this imagined page occurs on a contemporary screen, then its depth is implicit, it cannot be touched. Tactility is offered then denied.

This absence of techno tactility (even in the multi-touch swipe-screen era) is a common critique of digital media; yet, paradoxically, to its credit, the screen offers many illusions of tactility and three-dimensional space in a way that the printed page never did. The tactile nostalgia referenced by printophiles is (like much nostalgia) operating at the level of mythology: books by their weight and density convey a presence that is time. Books, by their texture, place what is read within a canon. As generations change, however, so too will the mythological status of tablets, cellphones and e-readers; devices will saturate in the memory of being held and read. That which has been treasured and held in the mind gains a tacit tactility; intimate, remembered words evoke identity.

To return to the imagined blistering text, imagine more, imagine that the letter-blisters grow pronounced as pimples, swollen with pulsating slushy ink; each letter now germinates and extrudes like a sprout; sexual, a thick fountain, a forest of letters, a field of wavering black stalks rises off the page; each is plush with a pulsing succulent interiority. Our viewpoint shifts, we rush over a thriving field of grown language, as if we were a bird or a low-flying plane, we rush over a field of wind-struck writhing letters raising their heads to the sun, following the reader.

It is all possible with CGI. It has already been done in a few commercials. Andreas Muller`s For All Seasons already replicates most (if not more) aspects of the preceding experience, and gives the reader-viewer interactive control. Text as field, immersive, tacitly tactile, already exists. Muller 4 years ago began working on a project to give computers the capacity to dream about flowers⁰.

And as Rita Raley points out, Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1989-91) and Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Lucid Mapping project (1997-98) both predate the emergence of many other projects concerning 3D space writing. Rita Raley: “Concrete poetry brought the critical importance of the three-dimensional language object to the fore in its exploration of the positioning of words on a surface. …  It is here that claims for a phenomenologically new mode of reading are best actualized; pointing towards what may well be one of the future trajectories of reading itself. “⁰

To summarize, two fundamental steps occur when digital text is made malleable. The first step is it becomes volumetric (the planar surface of two dimensions enters into three. The field sprouts.) . Another step occurs when the text is placed, composited and rendered into a video environment. (The viewpoint shifts, letters become objects placed and lit within a field). The reader may experience this shift as the emergence of both space and a sense of the eye as camera, the view (becomes?) embodied. The first step induces a sense of text as palpable, it implies tactility. The second step invokes a sense of existence, text leaps beyond a gap, it enters into the hermeneutics of existence.

Directory: conu -> THESIS -> public

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