| A New Alphabet ~ Commentary B 1 | |
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This pages portrays the idealized human in displays of primordial innocence and joy. The stylized modern figures dancing in Matisse’s Dance are contrasted against Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way inset. Renoir’s painting of carefree bathers, is joined with an image of a lone figure, looking out from a precipice of skepticism, in the inset of Tansey’s Derrida. The poem engages ideas about books and bodies and the evolving human. Artistic exploration of embodiment engendered the several discourses about textual embodiment. One of the more pragmatic discussions is in the field of editorial critique on book and page design. Other relevant studies are the histories of alphabets and language migration through translation. Johanna Drucker’s Visible Word is a survey of typographic practices throughout history and particularly the twentieth century. She follows avant garde innovations in text production and arrangement by such artists as Mallerme, the Bauhaus Movement and the Surrealists, in the earlier twentieth century. These creative avant-garde implementations were copied and then transmitted into mainstream culture. Within a few decades these innovations became the new typographic standard codified in commercial usage. These codified formats then produce reciprocal cognitive behaviors of visual perception and meaning formation. As an example, Drucker shows how the uniform block of text in books, is a typographic code that conveys authority, which encodes collective assumptions about the written word. An interesting articulation of Drucker's theory can be observed in codified screen formats in the world wide web: standard menu interfaces, page frames, menu locations, controls, and screen skins. Navigation and eye movement, then follow the recognized screen and page patterns. Television now borrows these codified internet screen formats by inserting sidebars and window panes in the television frame. Her theory when applied to electronic media demonstrates the possibility for migration of codified typographic forms between media. There is also a reciprocal relationship between codified screen formats and cognitive neural activity. Reciprocal cognitive responses in the body are determined by the mode of reading. This can be demonstrated with examples from film editing and video game usage. Current film editing uses faster pacing. The eye has to adjust more quickly to these image transitions. Paul Virilio’s theory of dromology considers the effects of accelerated speed on human culture and brain physiology due to changes in the speed of travel. The post modern body is acclimated to moving about at speeds of 30 – 90 hours per an hour, and accordingly the eye is trained to read a faster changing landscape. The formation of new cognitive habits is noted with repetitive performance of new digital activities such as: playing video games or reading text on video display screens.
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| © Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Contact: Jeanie S. Dean. Updated: 01/18/04 | |
