The Digital Landfill is a website to dump your cyber trash: old email, internet history files, last year’s website and other hard drive debris. “The Digital Manifesto” rejects old theories about design and graphics. The site promotes animated text and images using new software and design tools, and challenges the convention of standardized and codified display formats. A screen print of the MSFrontPage (web design tool) home page is placed as an icon for codified web design. The standard WWW Microsoft look and web interface, indicate codified typography in web based frames to illustrate Johanna Drucker’s theory of codified typography. Her book, The Visible Word examined page design codes used in printing and publishing prior to the digital era.
Jerome McGann collaborated with Drucker to investigate the logic of pictographic text in ancient Aztec and Sumerian documents. They determine an important component of this logic is the relation of figures within the frame, “where images become abstracted into a logic of relations” ("Images as the Text” 2). A New Alphabet, arranges divergent and sometimes familiar images and texts in new relationships of context.
Vaslav Nijinsky's complaint about fountain pens is quoted from his diary published in 1999. This late modern genius along with Isadora Duncan is credited with revoluitonizing modern dance and ballet. Nijinsky's Afternoon of Faun from a poem by Stephen Mallerme was celebrated the wild and primitive.
Postmodern innovations such as “The Digital Manifesto” argue for the precedence of software critique over media critique in current postmodern discourse on new media, holding that practice precedes theory. The creation of new design tools and methods or practice is emphasized, over the design content itself. The logic of media construction as a practice is raised to an art form, and the subject of critique in its own right. In “Avant-garde as Software,” media scholar Lev Manovich offers a similar proposition that new media is the source of the current avant garde. He further postulates there is an aesthetics of the database.
A website or a digital film is as complex an entity, as a book. The page or screen components are stored and retrieved as file objects from directories and databases. Underscoring the importance of method and object storage in new media design. Among these new software tools, flash animation creates moving text objects on the digital frame. Cinematography accelerated the photographic image with motion and added the dimension of time to the two dimensional surface of the still image and figurative art.
Digital publication offers this potential for multiple dimensionality of text particularly with movement or cinetypography (moving text). The 3D Book, a software tool displays text in a three dimensional format in an effort to emulate the tactical features of book reading. The digital landscape has altered the relation of space in the two dimensional viewing surface. The poem text in the page design is printed here.
moving pictures
moving words
cinematography cinetypography
The demise of the
2 dimensional plane of rendition is accompanied
by new forms of address and redress in the 21st century.
The skins of trees, hides, rocks, soil and oil are insufficient
to evolution’s ineluctable eluvium.