Ceci tuera cela ^{11 nov 2011}

With these three words, Victor Hugo characterizes so accurately what has been the recurring fear – or hope – every time some 'new' technology is introduced to the world. In the case of Frollo, the Archdeacon in Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, it is the fear that the book will kill the cathedral, that print will destroy the image. How is this relevant today? A reversal of the sentence would certainly feel more appropriate in an age governed by electronic media, namely that the image is killing print. By replacing ceci with "l'ordinateur" and cela with "le livre imprimé" the phrase becomes highly applicable to contemporary discussions around books versus e-books, printed matter versus computer screens, and so on. While some think that the advent of electronics has sealed the fate of print, I am not one of them. Moreover, I think that having a discussion where the one is diametrically opposed to the other is not viable. Technology, and in this particular case technology of the word, should not be looked at as a destructive process in which newer forms are trying desperately to kill the old. I belief it is more valuable to consider it as a process of complementation and transformation. I want to turn my graduation project into a quest to highlight some of the complex relationships between the different tools that shape(d) our Western conception of reading today.

Relation to previous practice

If there is a list of words that mirror the common thread in all of my work, this is the closest I get:

text
print
modes of reading
reading as a production process
reading through a production process

I will try to clarify this rather vague sum up by describing two of the projects I have done over the past year. This should help to illustrate what my interests are, how I work and where this proposal comes from.

The Listener

The Listener is an interactive installation that consists of two main parts. Firstly, it is an online multi-person chatbox that people can join by surfing to a certain web address. The chat is mediated by a computer script that alters the original messages by adding, deleting or replacing words. It operates in such a way that every participant sees his/her own unchanged messages, while the recipients are presented with a transformed variation. Secondly, a large pen plotter instantly prints out a complete transcript of the conversation, showing both the original and altered version of the messages. This way, the workings of the computer script are exposed – which is not the case in the interface of the chatbox itself – and a physical log of the conversation is made. The installation was presented at an internet cafe where people were invited to join the chatbox and could see their conversations being plotted at the same time.

As soon as someone sends a message to the chatbox, a filtering process takes place that scans the message for certain (predefined) words or pieces of text, such as 'hello' or 'how are you'. If there is a match, a script replaces these sections with an (also predefined) alternative text before actually posting the message to the chatbox. A logfile of the conversation, which is kept on a webserver. In order to print it out on the plotter, another script checks the logfile every second and looks if there were any changes made since the last check. If so, the script will use the information that is embedded in the logfile to first print the original message in black and afterwards the 'corrections' made by the script in red, if there were any.

As a text is read, a certain meaning is derived from it. The installation tries to address this creation of meaning in an online context. It is an attempt to show the subtle inner workings of computer programs when mediating the information we consume online. The use of the plotter is meant to amplify this: as a counterweight to the sneakiness of the computer program, it tries to raise the awareness about this issue by literally putting it permanently on paper in a very loud and ostentatious way.

Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway

Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway is an installation composed of four inkjet printers that perform the homonymous short story, each representing either one individual character or the narrator. The story is about a trip to a so-called „Indian Camp“ by a medical doctor, his son, and his uncle, in order to help an indigenous woman to give birth to her child. During the process - a Caesarian incision has to be made to save the mother and her child - the husband commits suicide. An important aspect is that apart from the narrator's voice, the whole story consists of dialogue between the father, uncle and son.

The installation uses the fictional time of the story as a timeline for the actual – 'real-time' – print performance. Dialogues and narrator breaks are thus printed out as if they would be performed by actors in a theatre play or movie, synchronized with each other and containing the time gaps of the original narrative. One complete print-out of the story is a five hour sequence of intense, concentrated printing sessions interspersed with long pauses. Nothing was added to or left out of the original text. As they are being printed, the sheets – usually not containing more than one sentence or a few words – fall on the floor, so people can pick them up to read and recompose the part of the story that has already been 'told'.

I wrote a script that constantly checks the current time and matches it with a logfile that contains the information about which part of the story has to be sent to which printer on what time. Whenever there is a match between the real, current time and a time-stamp in the logfile, the script instantly sends the according piece of text to the according printer. The assignment of – real – time to the text was done through my own interpretation of how the - fictional - time evolved in the story. The physical installation was set up in such a way that the three printers representing the characters in the story were facing each other, the one representing the narrator stood a little apart. The computer that was running the script and controlling the printers was not visible.

The thematic project we had been following that trimester was about re-enactments. The footage that was shown as research material consisted mostly of documentation about re-enactments of big historical events, mostly driven by a desire to understand or experience what it would have been like. I wondered what it would be like to re-enact a piece of fictional prose by means of performance instead. The starting point was also my longing to understand a text I was not able to finish in the past: James Joyce's Ulysses. Since this turned out to be *a little* too ambitious, I started looking for texts with similar style, more specifically ones that consist mostly or solely of dialogue. Hemingway's Indian Camp not only matched this requirement, the story itself could also be read as a metaphor for the violent European invasion of the 'New World' in the fifteenth century, and perhaps even for Western imperialism as a whole, which fed back into the realm of the traditional historical re-enactments we had been looking at.

Motivation, trajectory and concept

Apart from these projects, there is another source of inspiration that brought me to the subject-matter of my proposal. Last year I attended a symposium in The Hague called 'The Unbound Book'. The website announced the event as 'a conference that invites its speakers and audience to take part in defining the transformative landscape of reading, publishing and learning' [1]. A topic that not only aligns seamlessly with my field of interest, but is also relevant to discuss in an age where new media technologies are reshaping every aspect of culture, including the concept of 'the book'. The program looked promising on paper, inviting speakers from diverse disciplines and with various backgrounds. In reality, however, practically the whole series of lectures – apart from a few rare exceptions — was a tiring battle between the printed and the e-book. This will kill that. Mourn or celebrate. Taking part in the discussion meant as much as picking sides. Frustration was the predominant feeling that took hold of me when the last speaker left the stage. Frustration over the fact that a potentially enriching discussion was reduced to a collection of pleas in favor of one or another medium.

I hope to arrive at a more layered take on this topic through practical experiments driven by theoretical research. This research starts by immersing myself in a more in-depth study of the emergence of literacy out of an aural/oral culture. I will focus intensively on the invention of print and its importance for the evolution of literacy in Western society. The next step would be to move into the realm of electronic media, and more specifically its ramifications on those parts of culture that are/were highly print-dependant. The newspaper industry, publishing practices, journalism, etc. The third stage will be a matter of focusing on contemporary concepts and projects dealing with practices of reading through new media technology and the book in particular: e-books, e-readers, epub, Sophie, SocialBook (Bob Stein), RoSE (transliteracies project at the University of California), and so on.

In order to crystallize this research practically, I would like to disclose certain relations between electronics and print, taking the concept of the book as an exemplary window into these relations. I imagine this as a collection of small experiments in which reading experiences are created through installations/objects/programs/etc where electronic and non-electronic components are functional dependencies of each other in a mutual sense. Ideally, these experiments (or whatever the outcome may be) should be catalysts to think of reading as an unfixed and evolutionary concept that is subject to and moulded by interrelated technologies of the word, such as the phonetic alphabet, print and even computers. Naturally, I think these experiments will address the this-will-kill-that-idea by showing that in the supposed act of 'killing', new media instead appeals to and sustains its older predecessors, regardless of how 'revolutionary', 'pioneering' or 'totally new' a product might be marketed by its developers.

Research material

Books

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographic man [notes]
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy
Umberto Eco, Vegetal and Mineral Memory: the Future of Books
Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?
George Berkeley, Towards a New Theory of Vision
David Bolter, Writing Space: computers, hypertext and the remediation of print
Manual de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd
David Diringer, The Alphabet
Friedrich Kittler, Grammophone, Film, Typewriter

...

Audio, video, ...

Notes

[1] The Unbound Book, n.d. [online] Available at: ‹ http://e-boekenstad.nl/unbound › [ Accessed 25 October 2011]

Ceci tuera cela 11 nov 2011