Reading and Giving Voice and Language

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Notes

¹ This association with particular physical media is conventional and a function of human capabilities. It is also conservative: Language finds it difficult to be deployed in other physical media, although in principle this would be possible. Vilém Flusser seemed to propose that linguistic symbolic practice will migrate to the ‘technological image’ (Flusser 2011a, 2011b). Perhaps it is on its way, but very slowly. Natural sign languages are, to my mind, the only instances of commensurate human language systems that are deployed in another physical medium – that of spatialized gesture.

² One of the best expositions of this position that I know is implicit throughout the work of Derrida and set out fairly clearly in Derrida (2005).

³ I hope that this usage of ‘readability’ will become clearer as the essay elaborates. In art practical research, my collaborator, Daniel C. Howe, and I are exploring aspects of readability and the culture of human reading through The Readers Project, http://thereadersproject.org.

⁴ In particular, this essay follows on from thinking in Cayley (2002).

⁵ Saying that it is ‘easier’ to read glosses over a wide range of ways in which the ‘ease’ of this facility may be generated: through choice of reserved words and operators, through the deployment of more familiar syntax, and so forth.

⁶ I use ‘privileged’ here to indicate the kind of special and necessary relationship between low level (machine) codes and particular hardware configurations.

⁷ These works are referred to and discussed using a range of terms by critics of Baldessari's work. ‘Composite photoworks' is from Coosje van Bruggen, John Baldessari. New York: Rizzoli, 1990. See pp. 131 ff. and p. 184.

⁸ This consideration of virtual linguistic artefacts in a visual field has many fascinating special cases that it is impossible to go into here in any detail. Consider the status of the title on the cover of the (second) book in 2a. It is readable and also, thus, ‘language-as-such’, but it is also comfortably, diegetically part of the image-of-a-book-cover and so does not exemplify the diegetic break that language, I claim, always registers. There are the cases of film titling, of (usually failed) attempts to introduce readable language into film and video, and of subtitles that are ‘invisible’ despite the fact that they usually also embody a ghastly, tasteless disregard (without evoking the obvious necessary diegetic break between one language and another) for the composition of the cinematic frame. A historian of East Asian art, Robert Harrist, has written about the representation of writing and writing itself, inspiring some of my thinking, in Harrist (2006).

⁹ Instances from ‘Monoclonal Microphone’ were first published, thanks to its editor, Benny Lichtner, with a somewhat extended description of the process in Cayley (2011). This work was built using Processing (http://processing.org), and the RiTa natural language processing library by Daniel C. Howe (www.rednoise.org/rita).

¹⁰ The discussion, below, of our last example from distinctly computational digital language art refers to an exemplary and executable instance of such criticism.

¹¹ The series of works I am thinking of is Montfort (2008).