Bruno, Giordano. On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas. 1540_1600.
Trans. Charles Doria. Ed. and annotated by Dick Higgins. New York: Willis. 1991.
• 1591
• A precursor (of the graphic designer’s) communication in pictures, images as signs, non
rational, an initiation into arcane mystery, Carl Jung,
• Because the mind cannot analyze itself, the end of rationality
• Light as 1) natural light and 2) other kind of light which is “spiritual substance” [the light of
revelation] See the chiaroscuro of Caravagio (Higgins, intro; Higgins as a founder of avantgarde Fluxus)
• Yates (intellectual historian) as the major Bruno student of the 20th c.
• Hermetic mysteries, tradition, and is a “poetic” worldview
• Against neo-Platonic rationalism
• Against Reformation’s cleansing of images; for understanding through the contemplation and
associations of images; “thought gets lost in the beauty of the experience . . .” xxii
Calvino, Italo. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Trans. William Weaver. 1st ed.
New York: Harcourt, 1977.
• The untold stories within the deck correspond to the untravelled pathways in a hyperbook.
Calvino's description of the Tarot has many affinities with electronic hypertext, providing a
model for a graphic means of reading that stands in contradistinction with the signifying
practices of The Book.
• Calvino didn’t get to the Motel of Crossed Destinies in which travelers would once again be
struck dumb and find themselves only able to communicate by pointing to the pictures in a
handy comic strip
• “Despite its claims for difference and the claims of a great deal of hypertext criticism for the
same, I must say from the outset that it is not possible to locate a strict or fundamental
difference in the metaphysical sense: this mode of distinction must always be fated and any
binary that is constructed between the analog and digital is bound to be unraveled or dissolved.
There cannot be a metaphysical or ontological difference between the analog and the digital,
and yet it cannot be denied that something different happens when one works with, even
performs, hypertext: the difference this difference makes is the problem that concerns me and
hypertext itself.”-Raley
Horace. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, with an English translation by H.
Rushton. Trans. Fairclough, H. Rushton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1947.
• Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts
• MH “The Horatian rationale for sugaring the pill:”
• painting like poetry was an imitation of nature, by which they meant human nature, and human
nature not as it is, but, in Aristotle's phrase, as it ought to be
• “A poem is like a picture: one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the
farther away. P481.”
• Much about how bad poetry can be, how vain poets, how ignorant
• Imitation: They both not only represent the appearance of the world and the actions of beings
in it, but also improve on Nature through the means of art
• In the 16th to 18th centuries especially, the notion provided the principal starting point for
discussion of the arts in Europe, notably in the 17th_century French Academy. A closer study
leads one to suspect that part of the complexity is based on nothing more than semantic laxity.
In the 18th century Gothold Lessing argued, in Laokoon, that the doctrine had caused
unnecessary confusion in the arts__a point that was taken up in the 20th century by the
modernist Clement Greenberg in Towards a Newer Laocoön, when he argued that each art
should address concerns proper to it, and not those of another art form.
Leonardo, da Vinci. Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts. London. New York:
Oxford UP, 1949.
• figuratively, a test or trial
• the order of precedence among them (the "paragone" of the arts)
• Leonardo da Vinci's arguments for the supremacy of painting over the arts of poetry, music, and sculpture
– Painting as science (geometry, astronomy,
– Painting as truth (the eye is the least deceived sense) loss of the eye is the worst loss
– The painter as poet
– The painter measure distance, the musician measures intervals
– The sculptor depends on light
• take into account Leonardo's scientific terminology, the highly contrived form of his rhetorical argumentation, and
the role played by his original editors.
• Da Vinci elaborated on the relationship between painting and geometry in the first five sections of Paragone,
(between 1500 and1505.) He said, “the point is the first principle of geometry and no other thing can exist in nature
or in the human mind from which the point can originate.” He said the other principles of geometry are the line, the
surface and the “body clothed by these surfaces”
• recorded opinions that anticipate the modern classification of the fine arts, systematized in the 18th century
• See questionnaire circulated by Varchi, published in 1550 along with (more) Neo-Platonizing arguments
• Paragoni continued as an an intellectual pastime. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing?s essay Laokoon (1766), long
considered to be the last definitive contribution to the paragone, repeats many themes derived from Leonardo in
this new setting
• In the 18th century comparisons of the arts became a popular topic in England and Germany (Hagstrum)
• At the Royal Academy in London such traditional topics as the distribution between the liberal and the mechanical
arts, drawn in part from political theory, were reformulated to celebrate the values of an emergent bourgeois
society (Barrell).
Leonardo, da Vinci. Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts. London. New York:
Oxford UP, 1949.
• Hagstrum on Leonardo:
– The supreme apologist for painting (cf the power of his conviction)
– Ancient notion that of the five senses the noblest is sight, the peculiar possession of the
painter
– Repeats the Neoplatonic notion that the painter resembles more closely than any other
artist, the Creator
– L argument is at greatest force when he associate painting with scientific investiation
and experimental acquisition of knowledge
– Like science painting explored, rendered, and explained nature, the source of all truth
– In this process it developed powers of sense and mind associated with scientific
investigation: honest discipline observation
– Thus: the painter who deals with things is superior to the poet who deals with words
– Painter is lord of reality and need not speak (cf emblem tradition)
Moulthrop, Stuart. Victory Garden: A Fiction. Computer file. Cambridge,
MA: Eastgate Systems, 1991.
• As html:
– Victory Garden is a hypertext -- a story, or a web of stories, whose shape and movements can change
every time you read it.
– You can move smoothly through the text by clicking on the More button at the bottom of each page -- in
most cases, this will carry you further along in the current
– scene or story line. Click the Back button of your Web browser to review the previous moment, or to
retrace your path through the story as you've seen it.
– At most points you can also click on certain words and phrases (Michael Joyce calls them "words that
yield") which will carry you to a different story line. In most
– Web browsers, these words appear underlined and in color. Though yield-words often create
discontinuities, they can also map connections.
• Preamble:
– Whereas: Hyperdocuments are not simply Collections of Nodes and Links, but Articulations of Nodes and
Links in Space Whereas: the Space of Hypermedia is not the Space of the Book ...
– Whereas: "When depth gives way to surface, under-standing becomes inter-standing. To comprehend is no
longer to grasp what lies beneath but to glimpse what lies between" (Taylor and Saarinen) ...
– Whereas: We feel "the need to use computer networks as a means for creating new forms of collective
intelligence, of getting humans to interact with one another in novel ways" (De Landa) ...
– Whereas: It's better to do it than to write about it ...
•
About the paranoia often noted in users of this technology, there is nothing remarkable. Like other sorts
of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected,
everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination -- not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, perhaps a
route In for those like us who are held at the edge....
Pitts_Moultis, Natanya, and Cheryl Kirk. XML Black Book. Albany, NY: Coriolis
Group Books, 1999.
• How to write XML code
• “This demonstration uses XML, Data Binding, and Dynamic HTML to create a virtual dynamic poetry
application. XML Poetry allows you to drag and drop a "poem" from a set of words and submit it to the server.
Your poem is immediately published for viewing on the web.” http://www.siteexperts.com/xml/poetry/page1.asp
• “Coming to us quickly is XML (Extensible Markup Language), a parent language like SGML, and both derived
from and compatible with SGML. XML is designed to be much easier to deliver on the Internet than SGML has
proved to be, and much easier for software developers to implement.” http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/sgml.html
• Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) - XML for TEI Lite
– TEI Lite and Loose. TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) is the leading academic vocabulary for literature and
is also used for professional reference publishing. It covers many areas: books, plays, dictionaries, poetry.
TEI defined a very large SGML vocabulary; TEI Lite was a simpler one for many basic uses; TEI Lite
and Loose is an XML version. From Academia Sinica, Taipei. TEI) Lite and Loose DTD
– This DTD can be used to distribute TEI Lite documents over the World Wide Web: it is the TEI Lite
DTD, loosened according to the requirements of XML. TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative; you can make
TEI DTDs to mark up all sorts of literature and reference material. Please note that this DTD may change
over the next few months, in slight ways. (1999-02-10) (TEI) Lite and Loose is also available using
DDML, see next entry. There is also a version in text/plain http://www.ascc.net/xml/en/utf8/resource_index.html
Ray Gun: Out of Control. Introduction by Marvin Scott Jarrett. Essay by Dean
Kuipers. New York: Simon, 1997.
• Carson:
– "The message that the type sends, I feel, is as important as what it's saying. When those
work together, you've got really strong communication. You cannot not communicate. If
I make this [page] totally unreadable, that's communicating something. And it might be
about the magazine, it might be about this group. It's sending a message. So that's much
more powerful than leaving it blank, which also sends a message.”
– “If you think it's hard to read or too weird, you're probably not the audience, and that's
fine.”
– “"I believe now, if the type is invisible, so is your article, and it's probably not going to
get read, because-- at least with this audience, and I think it's spreading out more-they're seeing better TV, they're watching video screens. You give somebody a solid
page of grey type and say, 'Read this brilliant story,' and a lot of people, they're going to
go, 'Doesn't look very interesting. Let's try and find something more interesting.' I think
if it's invisible, it's just done a horrible disservice to what's potentially a really good
article.” http://www.joeclark.org/davidcarson.html
Ripa, Cesare. Iconology. Trans. George Richardson. London: Printed by G. Scott,
1779.
• In the sixteenth century, the humanist Cesare Ripa published an Iconology, in which he drew parallels between
the figurative archetypes of plastic art and translations in literary language intended to relate the emotions of the
characters portrayed.
• Cesare Ripa: Iconologia, Rome 1603 (Italian), London 1709 (English), & Budapest 1997 (Hungarian)
–
–
–
The major encyclopaedia of Renaissance and Baroque iconography, published in eight languages, in more than forty
editions from 1593 until as late as the end of the 19th century. This CD contains the first annotated edition (with more
than 2000 notes) of the first illustrated version (1603; 548 pages, 152 illustrations), and the single published English
version of J. Tempest (1709; 174 pages, 326 illustrations).
The subsequent editions will contain all the Italian editions (1593, 1602, 1603, 1611, 1613, 1618, 1625, 1630, 1640,
1669), and the critical comparison of their texts; a hitherto unpublished 17th-century English translation in
manuscript (British Library, MS Add. 23195); French, German, Dutch versions, and the single Russian (1803)
edition; as well as a detailed iconographic index of the Iconologia.
Our final goal is the publishing of a critical and annotated collection of all the editions of the Iconologia, as well as
the full text of its sources and parallels which presents and interprets the most important Renaissance and Baroque
iconographic motifs and their sources, in order to serve as a basic guide book to Renaissance iconography.
http://www.studiolum.com/frame.htm
• Cesare Ripa’s Iconology, proposed something called creative and fictional allegory, where the image functioned
in such a way that, by reading, one would see and, by seeing, one would read. There is no room here to cite the
descriptions he makes of Europe, personified by an extremely wealthy woman, of Asia, and her sensual
attributes, and of the African Moorish woman, surrounded by a ferocious lion, snakes and vipers. But it is
worthwhile to quote what he says about America . . . "a nude woman, of dark yellowish flesh, with terrifying
features, wearing a striped veil of various colors, hanging from her shoulder and covering her shameful parts. Her
hair is disheveled, and she wears around her body a kind of ornament made from colorful feathers. In her left
hand she is holding a bow and in her right hand an arrow; she carries a quiver full of arrows on her back, and
under her foot is a human head pierced by an arrow. On the ground is an enormous lizard or reptile. These beasts
devour humans and other animals [. . .] The modern writers have written about her: they are barbaric people that
eat human flesh."9 http://www.uol.com.br/bienal/24bienal/nuh/inuheck0201d.htm
American Institute of Graphic Arts. The Work of Bruce Rogers, Jack of All Trades:
Master of One; A Catalogue of an Exhibition Arranged by the American Institute of
Graphic Arts and the Grolier Club of New York, with an Introduction by D. B.
Updike, a Letter from John T. McCutcheon and an Address by Mr. Rogers. New
York: Oxford UP, 1939.
• Morris had an enormous influence. Among his American followers were Bruce Rogers, Daniel
B. Updike, and Frederic W. Goudy.
• he designed the Oxford Lecturn Bible, set in Centaur
• The 30 books he considered successful: http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailinglists/bookarts/1998/11/msg00228.html (xxxiv) of the 800 he produced . . . .
• Influenced by Nicolas Jenson’s types
• In defense of fine editions, collecting, resale, limited editions, quality of ink, wet papers,
handmade papers, (not necessarily letter press) and against modernist “ugly” type
Auping, Michael. Jenny Holzer. New York: Universe, 1992.
• Auping essay and interview
• Jenny Holzer is an abstract painter who turned to language to paint ideas. Her one-line works
have appeared on posters, t-shirts, park benches, large-scale public spaces, and even
commercial television.
• anonymous tone voice of authority
• billboards of Times Square, Caesar's Palace, Fenway Park
• Words become art
• Truism site, rewrite and contribute to the “archive”
http://adaweb.walkerart.org/project/holzer/cgi/pcb.cgi?change
• Lustmord (Bosnian sex crimes)
• “I am not a poet” I know very little about avant-garde poetry /the ironic?
• Auping on Venice installation: we see the artist critiquing . . . Her ability to communicate and
those who would call her a poet . . . A kind of anti-poet, attaching language (64)
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic
Age. Winchester, MA: Faber, 1994.
• Elegies:
– Note: Only literary fiction concerns him
– the story of how Sven Birkerts became a book reviewer, a passionate defense of reading
and print culture, and an attack on electronic media
– As a celebration of reading Gutenberg Elegies is an excellent book, staking out the vital
place of reading in our culture. Birkerts's arguments against electronic mediaare neither
insightful nor convincing, but I recommend reading them for the thoughts and counterarguments they provoke.
– "Every acquiescence to the circuitry is marked by a shrinkage of the sphere of
autonomous selfhood." [pg. 28] What others call a "community" or a "global village"
created by electronic media and communication, Birkerts visualizes as a web of
entanglement and entrapment. He fears the loss of privacy, peace and quiet, and selfsufficiency -- the world in which the act of reading takes place.
– turning against some of the core premises of humanism--indeed, we are putting the idea
of individualism itself under threat.
Birkerts, Sven.
—. Readings. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999.
• Readings:
– undifferentiated doom?” "wholesale . . . deformation of consciousness" is being worked upon us by the
electronic media.”
– “maybe Birkerts's sense of culture shock is really a sense of raided privilege” Kay Ryan
http://bookwire.bowker.com/bookinfo/review.aspx?6051
– Literature rises up at Birkerts's tug; authors and texts come to complex life. I took most pleasure in the
last third of this collection, made
– up of essays on individual writers including Keats, Flaubert, Rilke, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heany,
Elizabeth Bishop, up to Don DeLillo.
– Often in these essays the delicious personal experience of reading is as forward in Birkerts's attention as
the text itself. For example, he
– describes how in reading one of Elizabeth Bishop's strangely static, unemotive prose narratives of her
Nova Scotia childhood he discovers
– that he is somehow reading through it, as though it were a window to something even more fascinating"as if I were in contact with the
– self behind the sentences, almost as if the reverie induced by my reading were not merely adjacent to but
contiguous with her own
– language impulses." In the Bishop essay Birkerts draws himself up in a way I had missed in his more
handwringing pieces and proclaims
– that the way one expresses an idea may be the idea: "A prose style is a metaphysics."
Bloom, Harold. “Sister Acts.” Artforum S(SUM) 1996: 9.
• In Bloom's opinion, "The Romantic tradition is particularly vexed by the dangerous formula
"Ut pictura poesis"; Keats only seems to compose a speaking urn, and Turner does not paint
silent poems. When criticism has been tempted by these analogies, it has ended in confusion,
glorious as that can be in Ruskin or in Pater. The celebrated alliance between the New York
Schools of painting and of poetry, with the best poets serving as art critics, has brought little
clarification to the study of the poetry of John Ashbery, whatever it may have done to the
reception of the Abstract Expressioninists."
• He also notes that "Compared to the darker complexities of interpoetic and intervisiual
reference, language's and visual imagery's allusions to one another maybe relatively free of
anxiety. Indeed, poems frequently employ paintings to fend off other poems, while visual
works perhaps less often invoke poems in order to evade more direct ancestors."
• Bloom chides Hollander in noting that Plato is missing from Hollander's index and comments
at length: "It is instructive how many of Hollander's poets modestly intimate a disavowal of
their own ability to represent the Idea (of Bedness); confronted by the apparent immediacy of
paintings, they pretend to yield place. But they then reassert their own freedom and priority by
imploying their adherence to the Platonic critque of all mimesis. Painters thus are made to
seem, if more magical than their poetic admirers, then also more naive."
Bloom, Harold. “Sister Acts.” Artforum S(SUM) 1996: 9.
(continued)
• His review also makes the following points:
–
"Hollander's poets may seem to bow reverently before the paintings they seek to
appropriate, but usurpation is not always a reverent process. Poets rather
–
ruthlessly want to write their poems, and pragmatically the gazer's spirit often
reduces even the most awesome painting to so much materia poetica."
–
"As a poet and scholarly critic, he regards rhetoric as a mode more of invention than
of aggression. Yet his book seems to me an eloquent exposition of a vast
–
minefield of influence struggles between "the sister arts" (as Jean Hagstrum
continued to call them, in the best study before Hollander's). "
–
"I find in The Gazer's Spirit a certain residual Idealism, a last vestige of Platonism, it
is because Hollander has invested much of his own spirit in crusades of
–
learned interpretation against the prevalent political polemics that reduce all high art.
...Of his own poem upon Monet's Snow Effect, ...Hollander admits "This
–
poem acknowledges the problem of having to be spoken for." That is the sorrow of
belatedness, wholly appropriate to our unhappy moment, not so much in
–
the arts as in the study and defense of greatness in art."
Charney, Davida. “The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing.”
Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with
Technology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 238-264.
• "Studies suggest that when readers are responsible for selecting what text to read [hypertext navigation], they
often omit significant information altogether, perhaps because they can't find it, they don't know it's there, or
they don't think it's important.“
• She worked at Apple, how to design the manual for spreadsheet users
• She hesitates to endorse the wonders of hypertext
– hypertext may, in fact, inhibit real learning because the long-term memory of readers is designed to
accept linear ideas as opposed to networked ones
– people have developed schemas of the sort of style and type of text they are reading, they will draw upon
their knowledge of those schema to help make sense of their current reading. Hypertext, however, does
not yet, at least, seem to fit into a schema,
– wonders whether or not designers of hypertext can create appropriate paths for readers at all. While she
sees possibilities, as I've said earlier, for instruction manuals and other technical, informational readings,
she hesitates to say that hypertext could ever be appropriate for works of literature, etc, because, as she
says, "a text with closely interwoven points is not an easy or desirable candidate for conversion to
hypertext because it destroys the subtle interconnections of theme, argument, metaphor, and word
choice.
• For skill instruction, such as typical computer applications, procedural elaborations are very beneficial. But
conceptual elaborations are not particularly useful.
• [Lessing and linearity?]
Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art,
1909_1923. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
• Materiality of the text (of language Rita)
• Vs Warde’s invisible type
• Logue’s Illiad (Apollo in 20 pt) –materiality and (poetic) meaning
• 4 avant-garde poets: Marianetti, Apollinaire, Zdanevich, Tzara (modernist)
• Question of authority: the “unmarked” text of the Gutenberg Bible, “…Such a text appears to
possess an authority which transcends the mere material presence of words on a page.” (95)
• Drucker's book is a brief for the poetics of the marked text. To make her case, she presents
extended interpretations of the work of four representative modernist figures, each of whom
used typography in strikingly innovative, but nonetheless dissimilar, ways. Her account moves
from the militant Italian Futurism of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti to the vernacular lyricism of
Guillaume Apollinaire and from the "hermetic esotericism" of Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd), a
Russian zaum poet who emigrated to Paris, to the highly rhetorical Dada subversions of Tristan
Tzara. http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/mod/2.3br_drucker.html
•
Bagley, Ayers L., Edward M. Griffin, and Austin J. McLean, eds. The Telling
Image: Explorations in the Emblem. New York: AMS Press, 1996.
• Karl J. H?ltgen. "Francis Quarles's Emblemes and Hieroglyphikes: Historical and Critical Perspectives. 1–28.
• Michael Bath. "The Iconography of Time." 29–68.
• Ayers L. Bagley. "Hercules in Emblem Books and Schools." 69–95.
• Bernhard F. Scholz. "Learning from the Soldier's Helmet and the Windmill: Artifacts in Emblematic Pictures."
97–115.
• Marilyn R. DeLong and Patricia A. Hemmis, "Historic Costume and Image: A Factor in Emblem Analysis." 117–
38.
• Michael Hancher. "Tenniel's Allegorical Cartoons." 139–70. Abstract: Examines ideological implications of
certain gendered political cartoons that Tenniel drew for Punch in the tradition of Cesare Ripa's allegorical
iconography; identifies a strain of exclusionary caricature at odds with Tenniel's reputation for decorum.
• Edward M. Griffin. "Cincinnatus and the 'Shaw Memorial': Monument as Emblem in Saint Gaudens, Dunbar, and
Lowell.“ 171–205.
• Stephen Rawles. "French Emblem Books: Facilitating Interpretive Scholarship via Bibliography." 207–26.
• Peter M. Daly. "What Happened to English Emblems During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries?" 227–72.
Gombrich, E. H. The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of
Pictorial Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1982.
• "For the evolution of convincing images was indeed anticipated by nature long before human
minds could conceive the trick" - E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye
• Esp from Hancher 8710 Image and code: E. H. Gombrich, "Image and Code: Scope and Limits
of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation" (1978), The Image and the Eye 278–97 (on
reserve in Wilson Library); W. T. J. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1987).
• Emotional arousal is what visual images are best at achieving. They are much better suited to
this function than to making rational statements or even, according to Gombrich, to the
expression of feelings http://www.bu.edu/jeremymb/papers/paper-e4.htm#note21
• "Ours is a visual age.“ Gombrich
Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and
English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.
• Mitchell: It is also the moment when ekphrasis ceases to be a special or exceptional moment in verbal or oral
representation and begins to seem paradigmatic of a fundamental tendency in all linguistic expression. This Is the
point in rhetorical and poetic theory when the doctrines of ut pictura poesis and the Sister Arts are mobilized to
put language at the service of vision. The narrowest meanings of the word ekphrasis as a poetic mode, "giving
voice to a mute art object," or offering "a rhetorical description of a work of art,"[6] give way to a more general
application that includes any "set description intended to bring person, place, picture, etc. before the mind's
eye."[7] Ekphrasis may be even further generalized, as it is by Murray Krieger, into a general "principle"
exemplifying the aestheticizing of language in what he calls the "still moment."[8] For Krieger, the visual arts are
a metaphor, not just for verbal representation of visual experience, but for the shaping of language into formal
patterns that "still" the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array. Not just vision, but stasis,
shape, closure, and silent presence ("still" in the other sense) are the aims of this more general form of
ekphrasis.[9] Once the desire to overcome the "impossibility" of ekphrasis is put into play, the possibilities and the
hopes for verbal representation of visual representation become practically endless. "The ear and the eye lie /
down together in the same bed," lulled by "undying accents." The estrangement of the image/text division is
overcome, and a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext, arises in its place.[10]
• The doctrine can, of course, expand even further to become a general principle of effective rhetoric or even of
scientific language, where it appears under the rubric of clear, "perspicuous" representation, modeled on
perspectival, rationally constructed imagery. More typical, however, is the use of ekphrasis as a model for the
power of literary art to achieve formal, structural patterns and to represent vividly a wide range of perceptual
experiences, most notably the experience of vision. The graphic, pictorial, or sculptural models for literary art
range from the quasi-scientific claims of perspectival realism, to the grand patterning of architecture, to the
focusing of a literary work in a single image, whether an emblem, a hieroglyph, a landscape, or a human figure.
• http://www.otal.umd.edu/~eshevlin/mitchell.html#six
Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and
English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.
(continued)
• THIS BOOK approaches "the sister arts" (painting and poetry) from the side of literature; it strives to illuminate
neoclassical English poetry by using the methods of literary history and analysis to examine the pictorial imagery
of that poetry. Rather than chase the Zeitgeist of this literary period, Hagstrum’s study of interart parallels
examines where poetic imagery comes closest into relation with painting.
• Correcting a limited notion of the picturesque, Hagstrum promises to reveal the pictorialism of English
neoclassical poetry through four approaches:
– 1) looking at individual poems, studied for their pictorial images;
– 2) comparing particular poems with particular works of visual art;
– 3) sketching the historical development of ut pictura poesis; and
– 4) assessing the neoclassical poet’s use and modification of the pictorialist tradition.
• Hagstrum hypothesizes that pictorial imagery is most effective when it is in some way metaphorical rather than
purely descriptive or imitative of visual reality.
• He defines his most important term (pictorialism) as a description "which must be imaginable as a painting or
sculpture." Also, the pictorial must be ordered in a picturable way; the pictorial is not limited to one particular
school of method; the pictorial in text involved the reduction of motion; and the pictorial implies some limitation
of meaning. http://mh.cla.umn.edu/txtimjj7.html
• . . . to the detailed analysis of literary rhetoric that is carefully arranged to evoke the reader's pictorial experience
(the method of Jean Hagstrum).20 Given the variety of procedures available, any new study of the sister arts is
obliged to declare its method at the outset. http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/eliot/hw/1.1.html
Hollander, John. The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• Introduction and Preface to the Gallery
– Origins: Notional ecphrasis
– Notional ecphrasis: the short poem
– The notional gallery
– Actual ecphrasis
– Unassessable actual ecphrasis
– Emblems
– Actual ecphrasis: protraits
– The capriccio
– Actual ecphrastic poems by the artists themselves
– Public monuments
– Architechtural ecphrasis
– Photographs
– Prints generally
– Varieties of ecphrasitic agenda
• The Gallery
• Hagstrum:ecphrasis "refer[s] to that special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art
object".[3]
Hollander, John. The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• Notional ecphrasis-or the description, often elaborately detailed, of purely fictional painting or sculpture that is
indeed brought into being by the poetic language itself. Hollander notes the history of the notional ecphrasis
beginning with the aniconic disposition of the Hebrew Bible, citing the earliest examples of notional ecphrasis in
the digression of the Shield of Achilles from the Iliad (importantly the ecphrasis here is not what the shield looks
like or what images go where on the object but instead how the shield was made, as famously discussed by
Gotthold Lessing); citing passages from Virgil where Aeneas encounters the fall of Troy in wall paintings; citing
the narrated reactions to representations in Dante as Virgil guides Dante's gaze to carvings of scenes of the angel
of the annunciation, David dancing before the arc of the covenant, and Trajan in conversation with a widow in
tears at the death of her son; from Chaucer the narrative report of mural paintings in the House of Fame, telling
the story of the fall of Troy; and etc. through the 17th century when ecphrastic moments in narrative become a
matter for the study of the novel. In extended fictions, the notional ecphrasis may be a described image that is
imaginary. Hollander brings to mind Browning's "The Statue and the Bust," where a portrait in relief is
commissioned to perpetuate the face of a fictional lady. In the poem the fictional lady has an actual lover
(Ferdinand de Medici) who commissions his actual statue to stand in Florence. Hollander says "The actual statue
and the poem's own supplement, the notional bust, watch each other eternally, but of course fictively." (22)JJ
• . . . chronicles the history of ecphrasis from ancient to modern times, including ecphrastic poems in response to
sculpture, monuments, and photography By definition, ecphrastic poetry requires the viewer/poet to "enter into"
the spirit and feeling of the subject through a variety of poetic stances: describing, noting, reflecting, or
addressing. http://www.ncte.org/notesplus/GorrellJanuary2001.shtml
Horn, Robert. Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century.
Bainbridge Island, WA: MacroVU, Inc., 1998. [Argumentation Maps. 1 Mar.
00 <http://macrovu.com>]
• Argumentation maps: For the past 5 years, our argumentation mapping project at Stanford has focused on building
large visual diagrams of major philosophical arguments. In one sense, they represent at new genre of diagraming,
in that they are conceptual "maps" of a major ongoing debates. In a wider sense, they present a new way of
showing how world-wide, interdisciplinary debates are taking place, hence the name argumentation mapping. The
maps are used for teaching, learning, and research. In teaching they provide the big picture overviews that are
often very difficult to convey in any other way, especially in diffuse, sprawling, interdisciplinary arguments. The
study of argumentation has been with us at least since Aristotle's Rhetoric. In modern times, Stephen Toulmin
redirected the field by focusing attention on how debates are actually carried out rather than on the formal,
deductive presentation of arguments. We have been building on his work.
• Addressing the split between practical and fine art
• A new genre of art emerging : the information mural
• Split between words and images in the process of being bridged by a new language
• Seeing narrative as an important component of meaning
• Information design answering the calls for meaning
• The Great Clip Art Debate
• http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/VLbkSpeechMuralsTheHague.html
Ivins, William M. Prints and Visual Communication. 1953. Cambridge: MIT P,
1969.
• See also Korean guy at Stanford? And the beginning of scientific illustration
• .. I became aware . . . that many of the most characteristic ideas and abilities of our western civilization have been
intimately related to our skills exactly to repeat pictorial statements and communications" (p. 1).
• "Although every history of European civilization makes much of the invention in the mid_fifteenth century of
ways to print words from moveable types, it is customary in those histories to ignore the slightly earlier discovery
of ways to print pictures and diagrams, A book, so far as it contains a text, is a container of exactly repeatable
word symbols arranged in exactly repeatable order. Men have been using such containers for at least five
thousand years. Because of this it can be argued that the printing of books was no more than a way to do with a
much smaller number of proof readings. Prior to 1501 few books were printed in editions larger than that
handwritten one of a thousand copies to which Pliny the Younger referred in the second century of our era. The
printing of pictures, however, unlike the printing of words from moveable types, brought a completely new
thing into existence it made possible for the first time pictorial statements of a kind that could be exactly
repeated during the effective life of the printing surface. This exact repetition of pictorial statements has
had incalculable effects upon knowledge and thought, upon science and technology, of every kind. It is
hardly too much to say that since the invention of writing there has been no more important invention than
that of the exactly repeatable pictorial statement" (pp. 2_3).
• “…the accepted report of an event is of greater importance than the event, for what we think about and act
upon is the symbolic report and not the concrete event itself.”p. 180
• in Prints as Visual Communication, William Ivins speaks of the "tyranny of the engraver’s nets of rationality"
(88) and says that the "webbing of lines [was] an incident of manufacture" (168). Under Rubens’ system, all
copied artwork—be it oil painting or technical drawing or sculptural copy—came out of the engraver’s shop
looking very similar in style, thus the prejudice against the "mechanick" nature of engraving, which made art over
in its own image (Ivins 73). Like the dot in a modern half-tone screen, the engraved line is a reductive element
that has no capacity for meaning when taken by itself (Eaves, "Machine" 905). The line meant something entirely
different to engravers, then, than it did to artists, and the split in line use is representative of the split in the two
professions: artists created art, while engravers merely copied it.
Ivins, William M. Prints and Visual Communication. 1953. Cambridge: MIT P,
1969.
• See also Korean guy at Stanford? And the beginning of scientific
illustration:http://www.stanford.edu/~apang/visual/index.html
• William Ivins' reputation rests largely on Prints and visual communication, a slender volume that makes large
claims on behalf of the importance of printing technologies for the development of science and technology.
Originally delivered as a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston, this 1953 book contends that the
development of woodcuts, engravings, lithography, and finally photography were essential to the development of
the modern sciences, particularly the biomedical and field sciences. Words, he notes, can accurately be copied
and recopied by hand, but hand_drawn copies of pictures always contain distortions: as originals are copied (and
then those copies are copied again), the errors multiply rapidly. As a result, Ivins notes, "prior to the
Renaissance... there was no way of publishing a picture as there was of a text," and reliable botanical illustrations,
landscapes, and the like could only be shared with a few people. The role of the printing press in the Renaissance
is well established (so well that historians fiercely debate it); Ivins argues that the development of woodcuts, of
which thousands of copies could be made, was an essential precondition to the birth of modern science. Wider
communication of visual scientific facts was now possible, but there were still problems. Most important,
engravings and etchings could never be true facsimiles of nature, for they imposed their own syntax of lines and
crosshatchings on pictures, and their quality depended heavily on the skill of the artists executing them. These
limitations were finally transcended, Ivins concludes, with the invention of photography and the relief halftone.
Photography allowed exact reproduction of scenes of nature, and the relief halftone allowed exact reproduction of
those photographs, opening the way to the mass_production of "visual reports that had no interfering symbolic
linear syntax of their own."[14] Even after forty years, the brilliance of Ivins' insights, the entertaining (even
combative) style of his argument, and the power of his simple questions make Prints and visual communication a
pleasure to read. Ivins does us a great service by arguing for the importance of printing technology in the history
of scientific images, and demonstrating the complexity of the relationship between original images and
reproductions. However, his belief that photography and halftone printing solved centuries of problems in
representation now obviously seems misplaced.
Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy, and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U
of Michigan P, 1995.
• Co creator of Storyspace (with Jay Bolter)
• “The essay argues, as the whole of this collection in some sense does, that in the late age of
print the topography of the text is subverted and reading is design enacted. Thus, the choices a
text presents depend upon the complicity of the reader in creating and shaping meaning and
narrative. As more people buy and do not read more books than have ever been published
before, the book is merely a fleeting, momentary marketable, physical instantiation of the
network. Readers face the task of re_embodying reading as movement, as an action rather than
a thing, network out of book.”(11)
• "We are the children of the aleatory convergence. Our longing for multiplicity and simultaneity
seems upon reflection an ancient one, the sole center of the whirlwind, the one silence.”
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1992.
• Mimetic take on ecphrasis
• From Lessing’s general position, Murray Kreiger writes, ‘What is being described in ekphrasis
is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and
afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant's vision, but a mirage
because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem's words.’
• as if to look into the illusionary representation of the unrepresentable, even while that
representation is allowed to masquerade as a natural sign, as if it could be an adequate
substitute for its object
• What is stated in all these diverse attempts at ekphrasis is the semiotic status of both space and
the visual in the representational attempt by the verbal art-an ultimately vain attempt-to capture
these within its temporal sequence, which would form itself into its own poetic
object:"semiotic desire for the natural sign" and, on the other, "the rejection of any such claim
to the 'natural,‘
• [To create enargeia is to use words to yield so vivid a description that they - dare we say
literally? - place the represented object before the reader's (hearer's) inner eye]
• the history of epigram to ekphrasis to emblem:
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1992.
(continued)
• 1) "The movement from epigram (with the word as subsidiary to the object it accompanies) to the minimal notion of ekphrasis
(with the word attempting an equivalence to a described object) achieves its ultimate claim in the poem_as_emblem (with the
word as itself the primary object). It is in the latter that the ekphrastic principle would most fully realize itself. Thus I see the
ekphrastic principle, which I have traced here from the "visual epistemology" of Plato and the consequent call for enargeia, as
completing itself in the verbal emblem of the Renaissance. This development from Plato's enargeia to the Renaissance emblem
is for me the first major extended moment__and the most complex_in the history of my subject."(23)
• 2) "...by the late seventeenth century and through the first half of the eighteenth, the well_ordered semiotics of the
untransforming mirror, differently sponsored by rationalism and by empiricism, restores the dominance of the doctrine of a
literalistic imitation and with it, thanks to the continued appeal to "visual epistemology," the authority of the ut pictura poesis.
this second moment in the history of my subject, a more uncomplicated moment that treats poetry as verbal painting....the
medium of the verbal arts is to be thinned to utter transparency in their effort, as a disadvantaged relation, to emulate the
natural sign arts, now restored to primacy as the model for all the arts." (23)
•
3) "...of those occasions on which language, as if discovering and exploiting its other_than_natural sign function, permits the
poet not only to gain effects beyond the reach of the painter but even to 'get the better of nature.' In valorizing the "sublime" at
the expense of the "beautiful," Burke would have us break through the finite dimensions of the merely pictorial to the
limitless potentialities of unpictural emotions. this shift from the externally directed natural sign to internal human expression
creates a third moment for my narrative, one that springs from an anti_formal impulse." (25)
• 4) "...a different notion of what it is to emulate nature....under New Criticism...the paradox of an internal ekphrasis can flourish
a new as the mark of a spatial form that can coexist with the flowing character of words as an aesthetic medium. ...The poem
as emblem, under the ekphrastic principle, seeks to create itself as its own object. And yet no object." (25)
• 5) "...our current moment, the negative postmodern skepticism ...the various literary movements, have, in their anxiety to press
their own antiformalism, clearly declared such claims to be deceptive self_mystification resulting form the sacralizing or
fetishizing impulse of a long reactionary moment...arguing for a rhetoric of temporality that would dissolve the would_be
emblem_that ekphrastic gesture_and let the string of allegories, like life's unrepeatable moment, keep running." (27)
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1992.
(continued)
• The point of Krieger’s 1967 article was to trace his own development in treating the literary/art
historical genre ekphrasis, but also to suggest some application of the ekphrastic principle "to
what we used to call primary literary works." In this article then, through a discussion of
mechanical, golden, earthly birds turned ledgenday (Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth), and urns
presented as aesthetic jars, Krieger resolves the temporal/spatial duality of text/image, to a
topos where poetic language takes on plasticity as well as spatiality. Krieger has it both ways
with the temporal/spatial duality affirmed by Lessing by suggesting that in poetry we recognize
here_and_now unique concreteness making ritual motions of aesthetic pattern, echo and
repetition, becoming "forever_now motions." Krieger presents the possiblity of a simultaneous
perception of motion and stasis, and he confronts the Lessing tradition, with its neat
separateness of the mutually delimiting arts, and sees a time_space breakthrough in the
plasticity of the language of poetry. This language tries to become an object with as much
substance as the medium of the plastic arts, the words thus establishing a plastic aesthetic for
themselves, sometimes using the ekphrastic object as their emblem. His discussion concludes
with inclusion of this "still movement" ekphrastic agenda into his aestheic theory: "I would
give the special liberating license to our best poetry, insisting on its ekphrastic completeness
that allows us to transfer the human conquest of time from the murky subjective caverns of
phenomenology to the well_wrought, well_lighted place of aesthetics."
http://www.d.umn.edu/~jjacobs1/appendix.htm
Landow, George P. Hyper/Text/Theory. Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
• George Landow was amongst the early few to spot the similarities between modern literary theory and
thetechnological possibilities of hypertext programmes. This isthe third of his publications which explore
connexionsbetween them. The general argument he makes is that thedigitization of text coupled with the
associative links ofhypertext represents a development of revolutionary potential. It makes new literary forms
available, blurs distinctions between existing genres ['boundary erasure']and makes possible anything from
multimedia compilations started by authors but completed by their readers, to texts which are 'unreproducible'
because of their size and their constant revision. His introductory essay is an invigorating mixture of reports on
hypertext projects and visionary ideas of the kind promoted by Jay Bolter and NicholasNegroponte.
• Developing Intermedia, a hypertext system
• Intro:”Hypertext, an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text, or lexias, and the electronic
links that join them, has much in common with recent literary and critical theory. For example, like much recent
work by poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, hypertext reconceives conventional,
long_held assumptions about authors and readers and the texts they write and read. Electronic linking, which
provides one of the defining features of hypertext, also embodies Julia Kristeva's notions of intertextuality,
Mikhail Bakhtin's emphasis upon multiivocality, Michel Foucault's conceptions of networks of power, and Gilles
• Deleuze and Felix Guattari's ideas of rhizomatic, 'nomad thought.' The very idea of hypertextuality seems to have
taken form at approximately the same time that poststructuralism developed, but their points of convergence have
a closer relation than that of mere contingency, for both grow out of dissatisfaction with the related phenomena of
the printed book and hierarchical thought. For this reason even thinkers like Helene Cixous, who seem resolutely
opposed to technology, can call for ideas, such as *l'ecriture feminine*,that appear to find their instantiation in this
new information technology.” (1)
Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• Humanist
• Lanham believes that the current shift toward electronic text (with its capacity to incorporate sound, video, text,
animation, and graphics) together with the changes in the means of communication (data highways, etc.) are not
so much driving change in the age as providing the means for the incarnation within the everyday world of the
postmodern ideals of plurality and democracy. Also, he anticipates a fusion of oral and literate culture in the
multimedia nature of computer communications.
• Lanham locates the possibility for a flexible centrality (connected to the periphery) in adopting the study of
rhetoric in the first two years of University. This study would, presumably, equip the student with skills to
approach the reading and writing of texts of many sorts. It would also equip the student for navigating the world
of electronic text. One of the more profound aspects of Lanham's vision of rhetoric is that it would unite two
different approaches to knowledge: the oral and the literate.
• The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory (chapter 4)
• Orality (rhetoric as as a general theory of knowledge): Rather than experiencing a complete return to an oralbased culture, the electronic media of our time reintroduce elements of oral culture into our consciousness and
will fuse strangely with print literacy.
• Throughout, Lanham argues that the dichotomy between a fixed, authoritative printed text and the dynamic,
negotiable electronic word reenacts a much older opposition, the ancient debate between the philosophers and the
rhetoricians. The computer, an "intrinsically rhetorical device," enfranchises the free play and experimentation
that pervade postmodern arts and letters. It embodies the new kind of seriousness that is now replacing nineteenthcentury cultural solemnity.
Lessing, Gotthold E. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.
1766. Trans. Edward A. McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.
• Gotthold Lessing in Laokoon (1766), attacked the old notion of Ut Pictura Poesis ‘as is painting so is poetry’ as
confusing. He famously separated literature as an art of time from painting as an art of space. The visual arts are
seen as forms existing in space being apprehended instantaneously. The verbal arts take up little space but unfold
during time.
• Mitchell: (Iconology) "Space and Time: Lessing's Laocoon and the Politics of Genre,"
• “... nothing requires the poet to concentrate on one single moment. He takes up each of his actions, as he likes,
from its very origin and conducts it through all possible modifications to its final close. Every one of these
modifications, which would cost the artist an entire separate canvas or marble block, costs the poet a single line.”
G. E. Lessing, Laocoon.
• Lessing's Laocoon sets out the poet's ideas defining the differences and appropriate potentials of poetry, painting
and sculpture in regard to their representation of historical narrative subjects. It defines the end of the period,
beginning in the Renaissance, which sought to establish painting as equivalent or rival to poetry as a form of
presenting histories (1). Lessing's differentiation rests on his observation that poetry is most able to represent
actions whilst only suggesting the appearances of physical bodies, whereas painting and sculpture are more
suitable to the representation of bodies whilst only suggesting action. Following Aristotle's statement that it is
through actions that we can better aprehend moral virtues (2), Lessing stakes the claim for poetry as the superior
mode in representing the fuller meaning of histories and denigrates painting and sculpture to the representation of
beauty .
Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and
Cultures. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
• Title? Snap to Grid means . . . The command "snap to grid" derives from a process in computer graphics whereby
freehand composition is quantized, or "snapped," to an imaginary Cartesian grid. (His seduction by machine onto
the grid of theory.)
• [C]ybernetic tools . . . are not simply consumed; instead, they produce new commodities and new work . . . This
exchange relationship grows out of but remains distinct from the so-called 'high-tech gift economy
• For hypertext, Lunenfeld recommends a neat duality of the ancient multum in parvo and mise en abyme as ways
of thinking about lexia.
• For photography, the text urges an understanding of the developing work of photographic art as energetically
interactive, integrating the audience into the process of image recreation.
• [Dialectic ] “ . . . grounds the insights of theory in the constraints of practice?was my way to move past what I've
elsewhere discussed as 'vapor' theory, a dialectical immaterialism that was so prevalent throughout this decade in
the pages of Wired, on trade show floors, and in academic seminars on cyberculture.”
• His argument is that net.art is primarily conceptual. "If we can indeed speak of schools in a medium just a few
years old," he writes, "then the 'net.art' movement has indeed led the way towards a conceptually provocative
practice for work on the World Wide Web“
• http://www.rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2173
Morison, Stanley. Four Centuries of Fine Printing: Two Hundred and
Seventy_Two Examples of the Work of Presses Established Between 1465 and
1924. 2nd ed. London: E. Benn, 1949.
• [Times New Roman, designed by Morison himself for The Times (London), whose staff he
joined in 1930. The last has been called the most successful type design of the 20th century, a
result of its economy and legibility when used on high-speed presses.]
• In typography, the printers of the 16th century abandoned the calligraphy- inspired blackletter
Gothic type preferring letter forms designed in revival of classical Roman letters derived from
text surviving in the cut stone of Roman antiquities. Morison tracks an "intensely deliberate
reversion to an aesthetic based in an enthusiasm for the civilization and culture of ancient
Rome."
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995.
• techno-hype?
• a founder and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory
• Made up of columns originally written for Wired magazine and therefore has a unifying theme but no central
argument
• Negroponte believes the value of the Internet is less about information and more about community since it is at
bottom a tool for interpersonal communication. [email is #1 application]
• "The haves and the have-nots are now the young and the old. Many intellectual movements are distinctly driven
by national and ethnic forces, but the digital revolution is not. Its ethos and appeal are as universal as rock music."
This means that the "digital future" is "more than ever before in the hands of the young." Given the decentralizing,
globalizing, and empowering potential of digital technologies, this bodes well for the future, Negroponte says.
• “It can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people in ways beyond
not knowing whether you are a dog. In fact, there is a parallel, which I failed to describe in the book, between
open and closed systems and open and closed societies. In the same way that proprietary systems were the
downfall of once great companies like Data General, Wang, and Prime, overly hierarchical and status-conscious
societies will erode. The nation-state may go away. And the world benefits when people are able to compete with
imagination rather than rank.” Wired Interview 2.1.95
• [Paul Valery once remarked, the future is not what it used to be]
Neurath, Otto. International Picture Language: The First Rules of
ISOTYPE. London: Kegan Paul, 1936.
• that the “reading” of isotypes should be part learned and part intuitive, quantities, time, categories of things, multiple sites; to
accompany either spoken or written language; should be scrutable acorss borders; was an EDUCATOR; that pictures, at least
at the beginning of learning communicate better
• 1882__1945 Austrian sociologist, political economist and anti_philosopher; possibly the most unorthodox Marxist ever.
Having developed some theories about a moneyless ``economy in kind'' before the war, he was assigned by the Austrian
government to work in what was, effectively, the planning ministry during the Great War. This led to his working for the
governments of Bavaria and Saxony towards socializing their economies after the war, a project he attacked with great
enthusiasm, continuing through two coups that brought to power two different ``Soviet Republics''. (He had cleverly arranged
to be hired as a civil servant...) Eventually the central German government restored order and arrested him as a collaborator in
high treason, but they had to let him go when it became evident that he didn't care about anything except his work, and had
barely noticed the changes in government. (The intervention of Max Weber and various Austrian officials helped.) When he
got back to Vienna, we became involved in a project which evolved into the ``Social and Economic Museum'', which
tried to convey complicated social and economic relations to the largely un_educated Viennese public. (The didn't call
it Red Vienna for nothing.) This led to some very interesting work on graphic design, visual education and the visual
display of quantitative information, indeed, a whole ``Vienna Method'' for such displays, also called Isotype. During
this period he also became one of the most logically positive of the Logical Positivists, to the point of being main author
of their manifesto and writing lots of philosophical papers about the principle of verification and ``protocol
statements''. He was the driving force behind the ``Unity of Science'' movement and its Encyclopedia of Unified
Science, which was explicitly conceived on the model of the French Encyclopedie. Visual education, physicalism,
unified science, moral liberation and socialism were all inextricably linked in his mind, and while the results could be
exceedingly curious, they were also sometimes very useful and even compelling, as in his book Modern Man in the
Making. On top of all this he wrote some good works on the history of science, and a line from one of those essays, made
famous by Quine, will probably be his claim to posterity. As such, it can bear one more repetition (I quote the version given at
Institute Vienna Circle ___ Picture Base, since it's convenient):
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct
their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put
there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be
shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. Despite this, and despite his (exceedingly harsh and sensible)
polemics against Spengler, part of his dream for unified science was to put the social sciences on a causal, predictive footing,
like physics or astronomy. Naturally, this failed (see Prophecy), and I suspect parts of Popper's The Poverty of Historicism of
being directed against Neurath. Austria after the Anschluss was no place for a man like Neurath, and he escaped, first to
Holland, and then England (crossing the Channel with a number of other refugees in an open boat, on which he did not, so far
Neurath, Otto. International Picture Language: The First Rules of
ISOTYPE. London: Kegan Paul, 1936.
continued
• computerized network culture counts as hope for unproblematic communication on the basis of an increased
iconicity which transcends culture and language beyond the exclusive reign of typographic script. Generated by
computer technology, and enhanced by telematic applications, a new design of knowledge is revolutionising
language culture, whereby discerning appearances tend to replace the exclusive linear coding of speech and
script.
Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and
Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
• "Each method of preserving and transmitting information profoundly intervenes in the
network of relationships that constitutes a society.“
• TV ads to Baudrillard (chapter 2), databases to Foucault (chapter 3), electronic writing to
Derrida,(chapter 4), scientific discourse to Lyotard (chapter 5)
Selfe, Cynthia L., and Susan Hilligoss, eds. Research and Scholarship in
Composition 2. New York: MLA, 1994. 238_263.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of
Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996.
• begins by positioning contemporary culture in historical context. She compares the current finde-siecle anxiety and excitement about changing modes of communication and transfer of
information with that of the Enlightenment. She likens 18th-century wonder cabinets to virtual
reality and traces the complications of seeing versus believing to a history of mistrust of visual
media.
Stephens, Mitchell. The Rise of the Image the Fall of the Word. New York: Oxford
UP, 1998.
• journalism professor
• “Moving images use our senses more effectively than do black lines of type stacked on white
pages. In a video there is so much more to see, not to mention hear. Moving images can cut in,
cut away, dance around, superimpose, switch tone or otherwise change perspective, without
losing their audience's attention; they can encompass computerized graphics, even words.
Seeing, consequently, can become a more complex activity; we might see from more
perspectives. For when video is cut fast, it allows the interchanging and juxtaposition not just
of actions within a scene, not just of angles upon a scene, but of entire scenes themselves __
dozens of them. Printed words risk their believability and entertainment value when they
attempt such maneuvers.”
• “Video, I will argue, is the medium of which the twentieth century's avant_garde has dreamed.
It can follow the meanderings of a skittish consciousness and grow surreal, even abstract, yet
all the while still engage. It moves easily, ineluctably to an ironic distance and might therefore
lead us to whatever truths lie beyond ironic distance. It has the potential to present us with new
mental vistas, to take us to new philosophic places, as writing once did, as printing once did.”
(Preface)
• the latest creative productions characterized by "fast cutting" from scene to scene. This editing
technique exalts the "whoosh factor" in experience and radically condenses energy,
impressions and information
Stoll, Clifford. High Tech Heretic. Doubleday, 1999.
• Computers cannot replace human teachers.
• Computers can cause more problems than they solve.
• Schools which take money away from buying books (or hiring teachers) in order to buy
computers hurt their students.
• K_12 education can be done at least as well without computers as with them.
• Learning cannot always be fun. Fun, educational computer programs are often more fun than
educational, and usually do not require the kind of hard work and critical thinking that are
essential to learning.
• [Way overdone but correct on these points.]
Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT:
Graphics Press, 1992.
• In it he develops his theory of "a language for discussing graphics and a practical theory of data graphics" The
first chapter plots the rise of data maps, which he claims didn't really develop properly until the late seventeenth
century, and then took off in the nineteenth _ from which he gives some very elegantly illustrated examples. The
centrepiece of this section is Charles Joseph Minard's time chart of Napoleon's attack on and retreat from
Moscow, showing the devastating reduction in the size of the army plotted again geographic location and ambient
temparature.
• Tufte describes the evolution of statistical graphics, and demonstrated the difference between 'good' and 'bad',
with numerous suitably 'graphic' examples of each.
• Graphical excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency.
• Graphics should show large amounts of data; graphics should be dense. Exploit the resolving power of the eye and
the pattern recognition of the brain. With bad design, the data can be obscured; but with good design, more than
simple x_y relations can be shown. Plot multiple dimensions (Napoleon's Russian campaign graphic shows six!);
make the axes show part of the data (range, quartiles); use stem_and_leaf plots, Chernoff faces...
• Graphical excellence is that which gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least
ink in the smallest space.
• Every drop of ink should be there to show the data. Axis ink can often be made to serve multiple purposes with
clever design. Removing ink can
• often make the data more clearly visible. No more chartjunk, no more grid junk, no more fake perspective, no
more garish colours __ just cool, clear, crisp graphics presenting masses of information.
Tufte, Edward R. —. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and
Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997.
• "Clarity and excellence in thinking is very much like clarity and excellence in the display of data. When
principles of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of
insight."
• This is Edward Tufte's passionate manifesto for intelligent information design. He is concerned with the need for
scale, accuracy, and truthful proportion in the visualisation of data. The book derives much of its charm from the
beautiful reproduction of its illustrative materials. He includes engravings, photographs, maps,
computer_generated images, and even built_in flaps showing motion and before_after effects. The diversity of his
examples is just as impressive, drawn as they are from scientific papers, conjurors' manuals, and even books
designed to be read under water. In one stunning example, he uses video snapshots of his own two_dimensional
yet dynamic visualisation of a thunderstorm.
• Tufte [pronounced "TUFF_tee"] makes his central argument in a chapter which has now become famous. This
discusses the mis_representation of data related to the 1986 Challenger space shuttle which resulted in a
disastrous explosion and the death of all the cosmonauts on board. His dense technical analysis of
data_presentation and bad practice is used to argue that the fatal accident could have been averted if charts and
diagrams had been presented more intelligently, more accurately.
• A chapter on conjuring tricks focuses on the clever representation of temporal progression in single illustrations
from how_to_do_it books. However, it has to be said that sometimes it's not quite clear what point he's making,
and he seems to be struggling with what is obvious: that it's difficult to represent fluid motion in static,
two_dimensional images. Eventually it emerges that he wishes to compare magic with it's opposite _ teaching.
One amazes by concealment, the other should inform by revelation. "Your audience should know beforehand
what you're going to do." That's a useful insight for some of us.
Tufte, Edward R. —. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and
Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997.
• deals with verbs. The problem is how to show events and processes, which unfold in time and space, in the static
medium of images and words on paper. The techniques he explores have a wide range of application, from
critical decisions to high art.
• As an example, he describes how Dr. John Snow uncovered the source of a major cholera epidemic in London in
1854. Snow's inspiration was to plot the deaths on a map, instead of chronologically. The result strengthened his
suspicion that the cause of the outbreak was a contaminated public pump, located in the center of the outbreak.
By convincing authorities to remove the pump's handle, Snow helped bring the epidemic to an end.
• An unhappy counterexample is Tufte's harrowing account of the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger
in 1986. The actual cause of the resulting disaster_damage to O_rings at low temperature_was discussed the night
before the launch. But the thirteen charts prepared by the engineers presented the information in such an
unfocused way that it was difficult to come to any reasonable conclusion.
• Tufte uses illustrated instructions for magic tricks to demonstrate how drawings can show information in several
layers or states of activity at once. This is particularly important in this context, because magic tricks exist on two
levels: what actually happens, and what the audience perceives. Carrying this idea further, he points out that
magic is "disinformation design," and that the same techniques it uses to create an illusion can get in the way of
the clear presentation of information. He cites two principles of illusion: "suppressing context" and "preventing
reflective analysis." The opposite is exactly what we need to encourage in presenting information effectively.
• The discussion of specific techniques continues with discussions of the use of parallelism to allow the audience
to compare and contrast information, and the use of multiple images to show sequencing of change over space
and time (e.g., before and after). The focus, as with the chapter on magic, is on presenting dynamic material on
the static, flat page. These methods apply order and structure to data, but only after careful analysis, as the
Challenger disaster proves.
• One of the central ideas in this book is the notion of layering, presenting as many aspects of information as
possible in a given space. As examples, Tufte favors densely packed information displays. They are models of
information efficiency, containing virtually no clutter. For this reason, Tufte prefers high_resolution media, such
as the printed page, and excoriates low_resolution forms, such as the computer screen, which, he claims, can hold
only 5% to 10% of the information displayed on a printed map.
Tuman, Myron C. Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age. Series in
Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.
• Tuman fears that the new modes of reading and writing (he has in mind primarily hypertext)
will undermine critical thinking and "push literacy in the direction of information
management." Even worse, he argues, since the new literacy cannot support the fullness of
human experience, there is the danger that we will end up substituting information for
knowledge in our value systems.
Vendler, Helen. “Worth a Thousand Words?” New York Review of Books, May 9,
1996: 39_42.
• As a critic, Vendler has much to say in this review concerning the theoretical uses of ekphrasis. "Poetry and
representational painting are openly thematic in a way that music and abstract painting are not. The subject offers
an opening for the critic as well as for the artist; and from the visible and discussable theme (of the painting, of the
poem) one can proceed to more refined discussions of the visual media (easel painting, etching, etc.) as they might
correspond to the language and particular forms of poetry."
• And she speculates on the practice of ekphrasis: "There are two chief reasons why poets love the stimulus to
description offered by a work of art. First, description is par exellence a means of multiplying words. Any verbal
description is potentially unlimited, and the more slender the point d'appui on which the fantasy_construct of
words is raised, the more magnificent and self_sustaining (as in Ashbery's "Self Portrait") is the effect created. On
the other hand, a visual image can also be a challenge to the usual concision of lyric. The richer the original
artwork, the greater praise accrues to the author who can convey its power with compression and point__as in, for
instance, the sestet of Rossetti's sonnet on da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks:"
• In Vendler's opinion. "The poems gain immensely from being read along with the visual images that provoked
them. And Hollander, a gifted guide to each combination of poem and painting, is at his most original in his
commentary on half_forgotten poems by Dante Gabriel rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne: these Victorian
poets are resurrected by the force of his attention to them and his understanding of their receptivity to painted
images."
• Vendler percieves the focus of The Gazer's Spirit as follows: "Hollander has the literary historian's appetite for
anything that will help answer his central questions: What do poets see in paintings, and how does poetry discover
itself, by similarity and difference, in painting?"
Warde, Beatrice. The Crystal Goblet. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956.
• Should printing be "invisible?" This argument is about the representation of idea, even about
that most basic rejection of picturing, the Platonic critique of mimesis as an assault on
intellectual truth. In so far as typographic text can be, through a kind of clarity, readability or
legibility, transparent to the reader pursuing meaning by reading, the reader will be less
encumbered with false representations inherent in the image.
http://sbe.d.umn.edu/ced/bber/jaj/WardefinalMain.htm
Yates, Francis A. The Art of Memory. U of Chicago P, 1966.
• The Art of Memory, was said to have been invented by a poet named Simonides (according to Cicero). In a bit of
ancient forensics, Simonides had been able to identify the remains of guests at a banquet by their seating places
around a table, after a roof had fallen in upon them and obliterated them beyond recognition. In the Classical use
of the art, abstract images of a somewhat bizarre (and therefore memorable) nature were conceived that would be
linked to parts of a speech and then to a well_known architectural feature of the hall in which the speech was to
take place. By scanning the variety of statuary, friezes, articulated columns, or whatever, within the hall, the
rhetorician skilled in the art could remember all the aspects of his speech. The hall would provide the order and a
frame of reference which could be used over and over again for a complex constellation of constantly changing
ideas. The Classical art of memory evolved in the Middle Ages into an Aristotelian form, in which the
construction of a memory image could heighten human perception and therefore aid in the acceptance of a moral
lesson which was being communicated. The Middle Ages had somewhat limited possibilities to support a
refinement of ideas and observations which sustained the culture. However, with the discovery of the New World
and the rediscovery of the Classical World, a sense of wonder was brought back into European thought. Exposure
to new cultures and possibilities that existed outside the realm of understanding for Europeans, opened them up to
the idea of exploring (as well as subjugating) the world outside of their known universe.
• The near simultaneous invention of movable type, and mass printing, produced another technological refinement
in the collective knowledge of the then 'known world.' Likewise, the skills of the rhetorician reached their
developmental zenith which would then subside as printed knowledge became more available. Curiously, the use
of memory systems did not become immediately obsolete with the invention of printing, but instead became
elaborated into yet another form as a complex, Neoplatonic magic which would have a far reaching, though
somewhat obscured, influence.
• Within the hermetic 'soup' of the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth century, the mnemonic images used in
memory systems were believed to be the gateway to a transcendental and ideal reality. The mnemonist rhetorician
assumed a role similar to the oral tradition poets, by assuming position of being the chief interpreter of the nature
of reality and the keeper of divine wisdom. By constructing their art accurately, the natural order of reality could
be 'recollected,' and the magus/rhetorician would then 'know' the eternal mind of God. Among the more important
practitioners of this Neoplatonic form of the art of memory are Giulio Camillo and Giordano Bruno.
Zapf, Hermann, and John Dreyfus. Classical Typography in the Computer Age:
Papers Presented at a Clark Library Seminar, 27 February 1988. Los Angeles:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, U of California, Los Angeles, 1991.
• Materiality and computer code?: In the earliest days of digital technology Zapf accomplished,
within its limitations, a remarkable feat by adapting the italic face to bit_mapped type design
(before the days of PostScript) while retaining a graceful hand_lettered feeling to the letters.
Those of us who learned italic calligraphy from Zapf's own exemplars can especially
appreciate the closeness of the digital letters to the original ones.
• . . even the best presentation on a screen will never show the details of an illustration or a
typeface _ especially with regard to the non_lasting nature of the digital generation . . . . I hope
that we will succeed in convincing young people that it is a unique feeling to have a book in
one's hand, to touch the grain of the paper, and to enjoy the quality of printing. . . . . I think
there is a major task waiting for institutions such as The Caxton Club, [which] may look back
to such a long tradition in emphasizing again and again the meaning of book printing.
• Hermann Zapf, (born 18 years after Warde), master typographer comments on the change away
from the handwritten: "I maintain that many of the greatest changes in responsibility for book
design during the last hundred years have come about because authors have been presenting
their texts in the form of keyboarded output." 22
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York:
Hill, 1977, 15-31.
• Semiotics
• Society is organized by codes of convention. But it denies the reality of this code. It wants that
these codes remain invisible or "natural". It wants "signs which do not look like signs." (See
sign) Barthes talks about denotation and connotation to clear this issue up. The black soldier
saluting the flag is just that at the denotative level. But at the connotative level its lends itself
to rich historical interpretation which has much to say about French society and racism.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969. “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” (1936) 217_51.
• 1) To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.
• 2) The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build_up of the "personality" outside the
studio.
• 3) The equipment_free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has
become an orchid in the land of technology.
• 4) Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman.
• 5) By close_ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring
commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our
comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense
and unexpected field of action. . . . With the close_up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.
• KEY CONCEPTS:
• original
• aura
• cult value
• exhibition value
• dadaism
Bolter, David J. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of
Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991.
• “ . . . To remain the advocate, to argue rather cheerfully that the computer is a revolution in writing" (p. ix).
• Part I, "The Visual Writing Space," discusses the technological embeddedness of various writing practices, from stone tablets
to ancient papyrus to medieval codex to the "Gutenberg Galaxy," including brief and informative forays into hypertext and
hypermedia. Bolter is perhaps on firmest footing here, and his careful, lucid style makes for a highly persuasive,
historically_grounded analysis that will be hard to dispute. This is the part of the book that those of us with even a modest
interest in the impact of electronic media on writing will want to surreptitiously slip under the office doors of our Mont Blanc_
or Smith_Corona_bound colleagues.
• Part II, "The Conceptual Writing Space," begins by tracing the ways in which the age_old conception of the "world_book" is
shaped and constrained by particular technologies of writing, including, of course, electronic print. In Chapter 8, "Interactive
Fiction," Bolter introduces the reader to Michael Joyce's hyperfiction, Afternoon (1987), and it is here, I believe, that many
readers will find themselves beginning to resist the implications of Bolter's argument. In such interactive fictions, ordinary
distinctions between writer and reader begin to blur. Readers are allowed to make (finite) choices about what to read next even
as they proceed through interactive texts, choices that control the sequencing of the text itself. Thus there is really no fixed
text, at least from the point of view of the reader_cum_writer (shall we write simply "wreader"?), and yet the (deep) structure
of the "original" text would seem to be immutable
• In Chapter 9, "Critical Theory and the New Writing Space," Bolter's chief concern would seem to be to substantiate his claim
that "Not only reader_response and spatial_form but even the most radical of theorists (Barthes, de Man, Derrida, and their
American followers) speak a language that is strikingly appropriate to electronic writing" (p. 161). Bolter's point is that
electronic text moots many of the critical concerns of the last two decades; as he puts it, specifically with regard to
deconstruction, "The deconstructionists seek to disturb, to alienate, to dislocate, and so by embracing the techniques of
deconstruction, electronic writing seems in a playful way to subvert the whole project" (p. 164)
• Chapters 12 and 13, "Writing the Mind" and "Writing Culture," warrant a few specific remarks. It seems a foregone
conclusion today that any discussion of semiotics__the study of those signs and symbols with which we humans construct our
cultures, our societies, hence our collective sense of ourselves__will of necessity invoke some aspect of that most prolific
polymath pragmatist of late last century, Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce's concept of the "man_sign" figures mightily in
Bolter's formulation; in the subsection entitled "A New Republic of Letters," Bolter extrapolates Peirce's notion to assert that
"For the new readers and writers, the human mind itself becomes a text to be fashioned and explored according to the
principles of the electronic writing space" (p. 206). A new writing space, then, heralds a new text, a new mind. Bolter's
subsection headings give one an idea of the discursive sweep of this portion of his text: "The Textual Mind;" "The Intentional
Gap;" "Perception and Semiosis;" "Virtual Reality;" "Cultural Unity;" "Cultural Literacy;" and "The Electronic Hiding Place."
Bordo, Susan R. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture.
Albany, New York: State U of New York P, 1987.
• Bordo argues that with Descartes came a shift in how the world was conceptualized__it shifted
from a feminine orientation to the universe to a masculine one in which the world (nature, etc)
was objectified. One of the dualities of modernism was subject/object, and as a result,
knowledge, according to Bordo, became essentially gendered, in that knowledge of the world
was acquired in terms of objectification and separation from that which was being studied.
• Bordo here introduces her theory that Descartes and his culture experienced a sort of
"separation anxiety," akin to what Sigmund Freud postulated young boys and girls experience
when they first discover that they have a "self" that is distinct from the mother, and thereby
become aware of their own impotence. Likewise, resulting from the "major and disorienting"
discoveries, inventions, and events of the seventeenth century, Descartes and the culture of that
time experienced this disorientation as a "cultural separation anxiety."
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
New York: Vintage, 1973.
• The painting evokes the reciprocity of looking: we can look at the painting, and it in effect look back at us.
However, is it looking at us, or are we standing in the place of the King and Queen who are reflected in the mirror
on the opposite wall? The value of Valasquez's painting for Foucault lies in the fact that it introduces uncertainties
in visual representation at a time when the image and paintings in general were looked upon as "windows onto the
world." Foucault finds that Las Meninas was a very early critique of the supposed power of representation to
confirm an objective order visually. This close textual analysis is an excellent introduction to the following
enveloping treatise on the "order of things http://mh.cla.umn.edu/txtimbw2.html
• We should recall that the goal of OT is an "archaeology of the human sciences." As we
recall, F first briefly covered the Renaissance episteme, and then the Classical episteme
and three empirical sciences. Now, to finally reach the human sciences, F must explain the
modern episteme, as well as two of its three realms of knowledge: 1) the empirical
sciences of biology (succeeding natural history as a science of life); economics
(succeeding analysis of wealth as a science of labor) and philology (succeeding general
grammar as a science of language); and 2) philosophical reflection, which he will call the
"analytic of finitude." The third realm, formal sciences (math and physics) is mentioned
only in passing. As we see, OT is an attempt at a tour de force: the conditions of
possibility of modern knowledge (science and philosophy) all in one book!
http://members.nbci.com/John_Protevi/Foucault/OT_II.html
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1968.
• Representation as denotation
• If Goodman's system helped to free the beholder from certain prejudices, perhaps it was also
having this effect on the producers of art as well.
• Mitchell: “But Languages of Art was to me a revelation. It took on the great, central questions
of aesthetics and the theory of representation and produced a novel and systematic critique of
the differentiations among media, symbolic forms, sign types, modes of expressivity, and
referentiality. Perhaps the most dazzling thing about this book was its refusal to enter into an
Oedipal relationship with its philosophical predecessors (chiefly C.S. Peirce and Ernst
Cassirer), much less to troll through contemporary theories of representation looking for rivals
and competitors, of which there would have been no lack among structuralist and
poststructuralist theorists.”
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other
Essays. Trans. and introd. William Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977.
• Since his essay appeared, machine technology (the emphasis in his essay) has been overtaken by a much more
pervasive technology vis information technology. The question then becomes: can the notions of technology
developed by Heidegger be extended (reinterpreted) to include information technology?
• Heidegger sees humans in their relation to Being as the most fundamental point of departure. We must begin from
this point and remember it at all times if we want to truly understand anything else. Our Being is an event that is a
setting in which we always and already find ourselves. It is the setting within which everything appears to us.
Being is the event of being called into the revealing of things as truth. It is the manner in which things manifest or
‘presence’ themselves to us within this setting. Heidegger wants the human to Be, that is: to be at one with itself.
This is achieved through revealing or ‘letting what is concealed come forth into appearance’. We must see things
as they are, not as how they may appear to us at first. An appearance is what a thing seems to be, but a thing is
itself with or without appearing to be anything else. A safe is a safe, even if it appears to be a painting on the wall.
What a thing truly is does not depend on what it appears to be, but how are we to k now what is truth and what is
merely appearance?
• Through the combination of multiple mechanisms we create technological entities that are based on the
affirmation of enframing as a method of perceiving the world as standing_reserve. By combining smaller
mechanisms, which are already based on the world as enframing, we ignorantly incorporate this theme into
our manner of production: unknowingly embracing technology’s essence and concealing our own.
Depending on our relation to Being, we may be letting technology take hold of our perspectives, limiting us. Our
surroundings are understood differently through technology and we need to recognize why this is so. The most
disturbing idea is realizing that we not only enframe nature, but each other. We accept the concept of using one
another for our own profit without even realizing what we are doing. We must remember that we are human
beings and what that means to us individually. True Being is remembering where we are and who we are, while
still understanding what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
• According to J. Millis Miller, forms of art and literature in which words and pictures are combined contain a
power that necessarily alters the world we perceive, rather than merely supplying reflections of it. This conviction
is embedded in a larger argument that concerns the direction cultural studies must take if they are to avoid
reinforcing the social and political hegemonies they seek to challenge.
• "Our" freedom comes back again to the responsibility to read, to read all sorts of signs and to criticize them or
make them effective again in the present. This responsibility is both political and ethical. It can justify itself by no
appeal to precedent, no established procedures of reading, nor can it blame the work or text for what we do with
it, even though what happens in reading happens. As the just judge must re_invent the laws, even though she or he
must be faithful to them, so the cultural critic must posit anew, as something new, the culture that is studied, while
at the same time being faithful to it. This positing also recreates the critic. To some degree it transforms his or her
subject_position, for example by implicitly or explicitly changing the scholar_teacher's relation to the institution
that pays him or her. Such a double contradictory command is both logically impossible to fulfil and absolutely
necessary to fulfil. Responding to it is the first obligation in cultural criticism (J. Hillis Miller, Illustration,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. 58_59).
• BECAUSE THE objects of cultural studies are now found in a wide range of media--including film, television,
illustrated books, captioned pictures and advertising -- new techniques are needed to read them
• electronic book as democratic and anti-canonical
• Lee & Jackson (comment by Twain) “My essay is less a continous argument than an array or constellation of
examples . . . but without an inscribed act of reading such as I have tried to provide, all the data in the biggest of
databases would be little more than just that, raw data”
Mitchell, W. T. J. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Mitchell, W. T. J.—. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
• For Goodman, formalism, the structural analysis of what he called the "routes" (rather than the "roots") of
reference, required a rigorous bracketing of ideological issues - questions of political, ethical, and even aesthetic
value. He wanted to suspend these issues in favor of a kind of pure epistemology of signs and symbols. Deeply
contested notions such as "realism," for instance, which seem irrevocably linked to "roots" in something beyond
symbols, he hoped to redescribe in purely formal terms (see my "Realism, Irrealism, and Ideology: After Nelson
Goodman" in Picture Theory for further discussion).
• Mitchell: It is also the moment when ekphrasis ceases to be a special or exceptional moment in verbal or oral
representation and begins to seem paradigmatic of a fundamental tendency in all linguistic expression. This Is the
point in rhetorical and poetic theory when the doctrines of ut pictura poesis and the Sister Arts are mobilized to
put language at the service of vision. The narrowest meanings of the word ekphrasis as a poetic mode, "giving
voice to a mute art object," or offering "a rhetorical description of a work of art,"[6] give way to a more general
application that includes any "set description intended to bring person, place, picture, etc. before the mind's
eye."[7] Ekphrasis may be even further generalized, as it is by Murray Krieger, into a general "principle"
exemplifying the aestheticizing of language in what he calls the "still moment."[8] For Krieger, the visual arts are
a metaphor, not just for verbal representation of visual experience, but for the shaping of language into formal
patterns that "still" the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array. Not just vision, but stasis,
shape, closure, and silent presence ("still" in the other sense) are the aims of this more general form of
ekphrasis.[9] Once the desire to overcome the "impossibility" of ekphrasis is put into play, the possibilities and the
hopes for verbal representation of visual representation become practically endless. "The ear and the eye lie /
down together in the same bed," lulled by "undying accents." The estrangement of the image/text division is
overcome, and a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext, arises in its place.[10]
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge,
1982.
• The alphabet was invented once. All variants __ Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Tamil, Korean __
derive from the original Semitic invention around 1,500 BC. Hebrew & Arabic do not have letters for vowels.
The Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they developed the 1st alphabet complete
with vowels. This transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual
ascendancy over other ancient cultures. The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for
everyone to learn vs., e.g., Chinese, which because it requires protracted leisure to learn is intrinsically elitist.
• Of the thousands of historical languages, only about 106 have developed a system of writing sufficient to produce
literature. Mostly have never been written. Of approx. 3,000 languages spoken today, only about 78 have a
written literature. English has a vocabulary of at least 1,500,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary traces
600,000 common words back to their earliest written appearance. No other language has such a resource. An oral
language will commonly have a few thousand words with no one knowing the semantic history of any of the
words.
• Many cultures that have known writing for centuries have never fully interiorized it; such as Arabic &
Mediterranean Greek, which rely heavily on formulaic expressions. Writing differs from speech in that it does not
spontaneously well up out of the unconscious. The process of putting spoken words into writing is governed by
consciously contrived grammatical rules.
• Ong says that abstract sequential thinking, classification, & explanatory examination of experience is impossible
without writing & reading. Nothing like Plato’s analysis of abstract concepts (like justice) can be found in any
purely oral culture. Without this spatial representation, retaining & retrieving information must rely on mnemonic
patters, such as rhythm (chanting, music, drums). This determines the kind of thinking/analysis that can be done.
Ong mentions these features. The logic of oral cultures is: additive rather than subordinative ("& this happened
& the next thing happened &"); aggregative rather than analytic; reliance on formulas (Homer: "Son of Laertes
& the gods of old, Odysseus, master mariner & soldier"); redundant; conservative (formulas are reshuffled &
combined rather than supplanted; once forgotten knowledge is gone forever); performative/concrete (no
statistics or abstractions); the context is always one of struggle & performance; emotional rather than objectively
disinterested; situational vs. abstract.
• Artificial languages: Medieval Latin, Rabbinic Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Byzantine
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge,
1982.
• In addition to pinpointing fundamental differences in the thought processes of the two types of
culture, he comments on the current emergence in Wester n society of what he calls a second
orality. This second orality, dominated by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television
and telephones), incorporates elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode
which has been subordinant for some time. Latin, Rabbinic Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit,
Classical Chinese, Byzantine Greek. These languages are completely controlled by writing.
They were/are learned by males outside the home, with no connection to anyone’s
unconscious. Ong claims these were proto__types for science. Modern science grew in Latin
soil, for philosophers & scientists through the time of Newton commonly both wrote & did
their abstract thinking in Latin.
Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Trans. Christopher S.
Wood. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991.
• Available through Expanded Academic ASAP:
The Art Bulletin, June 1995 v77 n2 pp337ff(4).
Joel Snyder, Perspective as Symbolic Form. (Book reviews),
• “For us, perspective is quite precisely the capacity to represent a number of objects together with a part of the
space around them in such a way that the conception of the material picture support is completely supplanted by
the conception of a transparent plane through which we believe we are looking into an imaginary space)”.(4)
(p.77, n. 5)
• Linear perspectival construction "is a systematic abstraction from the structure of psychophysiological space"
(p.30).(5)
• what he means to point out is the difference between "the actual subjective optical impression" we have when we
look at the world and the representation of "reality" achieved by means of linear perspective construction.(6) The
two are, in his view, radically different. No graphic representation of space, no rules of perspective construction
can be understood to stand in some privileged relation to our subjective experience. What we always see in such
pictures (no matter what else we may see) is an idealized, figured space _ a space that carries its own inherent
ideational content _ and the condition of just this content is, according to Panofsky, its immanent meaning.
• For him, works of visual art are inherently symbolic and their significance is an essential part of their concrete,
sensuous being - not something merely indexed by them.
• Subscribes to the “materiality of the sign.”
• (Supposes that Leonardo is objectifying a subjective experience . . . For instance.)
Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931_58, Vol. 2: “A
Second Trichotomy of Signs,” 143–44; “The Icon, Index, and Symbol,” 156–73.
• According to Charles S. Peirce, the most fundamental division of signs is his second
trichotomy of signs. In this arrangement, he considered the relationship between the sign and
its object. This trichotomy is composed of the triad of icon, index, and symbol.
• Morever, Peirce frequently characterized inferences from a semiotic point of view. He
explained that the three main types of reasoning are particular kinds of signs.
Semiology: It is about meanings, interpretation and the articulation of meanings. The following basic
processes interact to produce meaning. "The making of meanings or messages is known as encoding.
Interpreting the messages ... is known as decoding. The mental image or idea that we produce by decoding
a message is known as the "interpretant" . At the centre of this concern is the sign. The study of signs and
the way they work is called semiotics.
Aristotle listed ten categories and Kant twelve; Peirce employs three. Their names are, simply enough, first,
second, and third, or firstness, secondness, and thirdness.
Sitting back and enjoying a piece of music (without reflecting on the enjoyment) is close to
experiencing a first
the actual space-time thereness of its individual notes it is secondness
the identifiable structurings relating its notes, rhythms, harmonies, it is thirdness
Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931_58, Vol. 2: “A
Second Trichotomy of Signs,” 143–44; “The Icon, Index, and Symbol,” 156–73.
(Continued)
Peirce tells us that an analysis of the essence of a sign . . . leads to a proof that every sign is determined by its object, either first,
by partaking in the characters of the object, when I call the sign an Icon; secondly, by being really and in its individual
existence connected with the individual object, when I call the sign an Index; thirdly, by more or less approximate certainty
that it will be interpreted as denoting the object, in consequence of a habit (which term I use as including a natural
disposition), when I call the sign a Symbol (4.531).
• So this division of signs comes about because signs have objects, and is based on the way that the sign represents its object.
The key feature of an icon is that it bears a resemblance of some sort to its object, "whether any such Object actually exists or
not" (2.247). The resemblance may be the extreme likeness of a photograph (2.281), or it may be more subtle; under any
circumstances, "Each Icon partakes of some more or less overt character of its Object" (4.531). This partaking can be of a
complex sort: Particularly deserving of notice are icons in which the likeness is aided by conventional rules. Thus, an
algebraic formula is an icon, rendered such by the rules of commutation, association, and distribution of the symbols. It may
seem at first glance that it is an arbitrary classification to call an algebraic expression an icon; that it might as well, or better,
be regarded as a compound conventional sign. But it is not so. For a great distinguishing property of the icon is that by the
direct observation of it other truths concerning its object can be discovered than those which suffice to determine its
construction (1.179). The icon in a very definite sense partakes of the life of its object. Once it is set down, inferences about it
become inferences about the object, insofar as it is iconic. A mathematical figure of speech would be to say that the icon is a
mapping of its object, or a morphism of it. The mapping function may be very like an identity function, as is the case with
photographs viewed as icons; on the other hand, it may be complex and conventional. We have employed a mathematical
analogy in speaking of icons; the reverse of this coin is that icons are of key importance in mathematics: The reasoning of
mathematicians will be found to turn chiefly upon the use of likenesses, which are the very hinges of the gates of their science.
The utility of likenesses to mathematicians consists in their suggesting in a very precise way, new aspects of supposed states
of things (2.281). An icon represents by resembling. An index, on the other hand, need bear no resemblance to its object. The
key thing about an index is that it has a direct existential connection with its object. The uses of ordinary English are reliable
in our discourse about indexes; the index finger is used to point to something, for example. The pointing_to is a direct
existential connection with the pointed_to, and so is an index in the Peircean sense. When tumor, dolor, rubor and calor are
present, inflammation is indicated to the physician; swelling, pain, redness, and heat are indexes of inflammation. You will
find the party tomorrow night by looking for the house with the white picket fence__that fence, by its connection to the house,
is an index of the house and so of the party. "Indices . . . furnish positive assurance of the reality and the nearness of their
XML Cover Pages. Robin Cover, Managing Editor. 8 May 00
<http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/>.
• See also “Workshop on Digital Rights Management for the Web” especially: “W3C DRM 2001
Workshop Notes & Presentations” http://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-ws/minutes/
• The XML Cover Pages is a comprehensive online reference work for the Extensible Markup
Language (XML) and its parent, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The
reference collection features extensive documentation on the application of the open,
interoperable "markup language" standards, including XSL, XSLT, XPath, XLink, XPointer,
HyTime, DSSSL, CSS, SPDL, CGM, ISO_HTML, and others.
• The XML Cover Pages is currently sponsored by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement
of Structured Information Standards) and four OASIS Members: ISOGEN International Corp,
Software AG, Sun Microsystems, and webMethods.
Third International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Applying
New Media to Scholarship. U of South Florida. 16-18 Mar. 2000
<http://dmi.usf.edu/conference/tproceedings.htm>.
• Conference Sponsors:
• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations; Council of Graduate Schools; Microsoft; Adobe, Dell,
University of South Florida
• This symposium is organized by the NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations), a
consortium of research universities committed to improving graduate education by developing digital libraries of
theses and dissertations. This conference will serve as a multi_disciplinary forum for graduate deans and their
staff, librarians, faculty leaders, and others who are interested in electronic theses and dissertations, digital
libraries, and applying new media to scholarship. Featured keynoters and plenary workshop leaders include Ed
Fox, Director, NDLTD; Clifford Lynch, Director, CNI; Ann Hart, Provost, Claremont Graduate School; Gerry
Lang, Provost, West Virginia University; John Eaton, Associate Provost, Virginia Tech; Delphine Lewis, Director
of Dissertations, UMI; Roy Tennant, Digital Library Project Manager, University of California, Berkeley; Stuart
Weibel, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC.
• Concurrent sessions will introduce participants to world_wide ETD initiatives, including presentations by
Jean_Claude Guedon, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Felix Ubogu, Rhodes University, South
Africa; Peter Diepold, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany; Tony Cargnelutti and Fred Piper, University of
New South Wales, Australia; Christine Jewell, University of Waterloo, Canada. Concurrent sessions also include
reports from leading ETD universities, including VT, UWV, USF, MIT, and Emory. Workshops in computer
classrooms will provide hands_on training in Adobe PDF, XML, SGML, Microsoft Office 2000.
Spiekermann, Erik and E.M. Ginger. Stop stealing sheep and find out how type
works. Adobe press. Mountian View. 1993.
Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style, version 2.4. Hartley and
Marks. 2001.
Tchichold, Jan. The New Typography. Trans. Ruari Mclean. University of
California. 1998.
Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design, 3rd Ed. Wiley. 1998.
Parks, Tim. “Tales Told by the Computer.” NYR 24/10/2002. 49.
• ALL type is transparent. (more or less).
• Uses of obscurity . . . In chaos? Null hypothesis is true for narrative/ poetry deliverd in new
digital packages?
• Poetic uses of hypertext multimedia
• The most revolutionary development of they hypertext, most distinguishes it from a printed
book has to do with the succession in which sections of written text are read. . . . Dispeses with
the linearity that invites us to proceed from page one . . . Thorugh to the end