Epilogue

EPILOGUE           

A New Alphabet Iconographic Language and Textual Embodiment

A New Alphabet explores a spectrum of human articulation including: the indexed sign, gesture, spoken word, symbol, written language, and iconographic figures. Theories of text and embodiment, are literally, literately and figuratively engaged as lexicons of meaning. A new alphabet emphasizes how visual images and new modes of reading become encoded characters in a new alphabet of collective reference, as an effect of post modernism and digital culture. Experimental formats in page design and assemblage of image and text in this critical work, demonstrate new iconographic modes of reading and writing. As Johanna Drucker concludes in The Visible Word, “Typography renders apparent the relative rather than the absolute value of symbolic systems” (245).

One marker of the beginning of the digital era is the first ENIAC computer (1940’s). Other potential hallmarks are the first integrated circuit (1959) invented by Jack Kilby of Milwaukee Semiconductor and later Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. Significant influences can be traced to the early-modern period, with Pascal’s computing device (1600’s) and Bacon’s bi-literal cipher (1600’s) which provided models respectively for the ENIAC computer and the binary code, the language of digital storage.

More than the ability to operate a computer, a camera, a microphone, audio-video recording devices and players, digital literacy involves the recognition of a language of signs and icons. The digital era also transfers the human from analog (continuous wave energy) to digital (synchronous binary patterns) in both the perception and the production of consciousness energy.

Digital literacy occurs with the acquisition of new lexicons or (matrices) of shared meaning, by encoding iconographic or visual and linguistic content into memory, with signifying values. As George Lakoff’s metaphor theory posits, these iconographic signs are often derived from mass culture and other collective experiences, which are shared and commonly recognized. Within this matrix of collectivity there are divergent unities of age, generation, cultural interest, ethnic and geographic belonging. For instance, what is the word for Dorothy clicking the ruby slippers in Oz? What are the words for the moment seeing, the 1968 moon landing or the black cloud of the 2001 World Trade Center explosion. Is the moment of first perception, the same as seeing the reproduced image.

What is the path from image to meaning? A new literacy evokes a new alphabet. Recent theory focuses on the body of text and the text as body. Such inquires evolved from an interest in the relationship of language to thought production and neural processes of consciousness. Other inquiry examined text as its own body state, by way of archeological recovery of the history of typography, printing, language migration, cryptography, translation, and media production.

This book reviews the idea of the body. The two dimensional plane of rendition is the body surface for text and image display. Prior to the digital era, visual content --written, figurative and stage tableaus were recorded and displayed on a two dimensional (2D) flat plane. High definition digital (HDD) imaging can record and represent a visual scene in a full 360 degree perspective. In the digital recording process the 2D plane is unnecessary because image content is stored as sampled coded data in an unbounded storage space called a file.

The flat plane of the film surface, the canvas and the printer platen are obsolete. However, the flat surface of the screen, paper, canvas and proscenium stage continues to be the plane of projection for display of writing, art, and moving pictures (television, film). New visual display formats include animated text or cinetypography, hypertext, holographic projection, circular screens and virtual reality environments. Even as this study proposes an evolving alphabet of iconographic forms, that mix multiple media and perceptual matter, the two dimensional plane of rendition upon which this alphabet is presented and rendered, perhaps faces extinction if not reconfiguration.