how to read books in such a way that they change him… that after reading, he is different than he was before.’*
It is easier to read if you shut yourself away. That is why, for me, a traditional book has always been until now the only way to read ‘for the sake of it’. Then there are no options for switching – to other textual sources or additional contextual information. A sentence must carry enough in itself.
The seclusion inherent in a book (although thought of as a limitation) is crucial for reading. The challenge is in creating space in a ‘connected’ world where you are completely limited and can experience an enrichment by language instead of the absorption of information. How you can work with text and typography in the digital domain is still an underexposed area; a way which does not present reading for consumption or for information, but where words and their meaning are placed in a timeless area of tension, so that it becomes a new way of reading ‘for the sake of it’.
Luna Maurer is a designer under the name Poly-Luna and she is part of the Conditonal Design Collective.
'Wie wäre es, gebildet zu sein?', Festrede by Prof. Dr. Peter Bieri, 2005.
42. The Matrix: Three Subjective and Intuitively Selected Pointers for Building Blocks for The Script in Which We Live – Geert Mul
The experience of reality is mediated by a script. This script is the grammatical equivalent of a placebo: a form that channels the content/meaning/energy, but alone is nothing more than a formal structure. In the daily experience, the form (the script) can be exchanged for what it represents, that is its strength. Each culture has its own script. Culture is creating a script. A script is always dynamic and subject to change. Reflections on older versions are interesting for obtaining insight into the entity of the medium ‘script’, but political suggestions to reintroduce and reuse older versions of the script or to freeze the current version are, I think, rather stupid.
Pointer 1: Aristotle’s Poetics, 335 BC
Before the Christian God there was, remarkably enough, Aristotle (335 BC). The script that Aristotle created can hardly be overestimated. We (the western culture) have, in the subsequent 2000 years, rarely succeeded in reading or seeing outside this script. Furthermore, all possible media in this script (text, image, and music) are subject to one coordinated structure. The western history of art (of literature, theatre, film, to generative/interactive art) can do nothing other than work according to the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics or deviate from them, but as reference, the Poetics are never absent. All Hollywood films still closely follow the Aristotle script.
About Aristotle’s Poetics: 'The claim that tragedy makes on universality should (…) be seen as the necessity of a logical construction, without the plot becoming predictable. The real tragedy writer must construct the plot in such a way that the dénouement, the discharge of the accumulated energy, is completely unexpected. The structure of this plot should satisfy strict rules since only then can the aspired tension be brought to a high point in order, in a completely perfect tragedy, to be closed in a moment of catharsis. This catharsis must be seen as a release of the accumulated emotions.’*
Pointer 2: John’s ‘In the beginning’, c. 100 AD
In the Christian culture, The Word is elevated to the medium in which the complete world and non-world must be scripted. Writers often have the inclination to overvalue The Word, and since the Bible is a written notation of a culture that, until then, had been communicated orally, it is not remarkable that The Word is made divine. The Image has been condemned in part of the Christian culture to the area of idolatry, as an impure representation of ‘the truth’, a Platonic view of imagination. But if you read the following passage from John from the context of The Script, then the text seems to confirm that no reality and no world can exist without script (The Word). The script is everything: the script is God.
‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.’ (John 1, 1-3)
Pointer 3: Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Library of Babel ', 1946
In 1946 the poet and author Jorge Louis Borges wrote a short story: 'The Library of Babel'. The story is about an infinite library in which an infinite number of bookcases are filled with an infinite number of books that are made up of all possible combinations of the letters of the alphabet, the full stop, comma, and space. The consequence of this is that all the books that have ever been written and all the books that shall ever be written can be found in this library. This story forms a wonderful synthesis of text, image, and informatics and is almost a prophetic announcement of the digital information culture that, 47 years later, would grow exponentially with the arrival of the first graphic Internet browser (Mosaic 1993). Borges sketches a world in which acquiring knowledge is no longer the problem of gaining access to information (that is available freely everywhere in the infinite library and on the Internet), acquiring knowledge is mainly a problem of recombining in the right way and filtering out the excessive supply of information.
The world is a script and if you want to change the world, you must change the script. And that is why all great art is political.
Geert Mul is a media artist and VJ pioneer.
Stofvorm (philosophical online magazine) Ferrari, G. R. F., 'Aristotle’s Literary Aesthetics' in: Phronesis XLIV/3, 1999, pp. 181-198.
43. Horses Are Fine So Are Books* – Arjen Mulder
In the ‘thirties, Marshall McLuhan read all the writings of the Church Fathers in Latin and all the great books of the Western world in their original language before he thought it proper to declare in a number of blunt slogans that the era of the book was over and the electronic era would definitely come into being. In the new media, people would no longer read linearly – from front to back – but a whole culture would be simultaneously conjured up and gone through, something of which James Joyce’s Finnigans Wake (1939) was the precursor. Yet the book still exists and will continue to exist for a long time to come, and not only as content for the new medium e-reader or other apps. Even McLuhan is only read because his texts are published as books. As a closed medium, the book offers several advantages that the open, electronically-based and digitally encoded text does not have. Certainly, the space in which the reader can enter comments is limited to the margins and the end paper. Certainly, the font and size are given, although these can be manipulated with reading spectacles and magnifying glasses. Certainly, the index is not a fast search engine. And indeed, a sequence is offered, although nobody is obliged to follow it. McLuhan always first read page 69 of a new book, to decide whether he would go through the rest (he could read very quickly). But what makes a book a unique carrier for knowledge and experience is that the form of prescribed beginning, middle, and end forces that which is offered into a structure that expresses more than separate sentences, paragraphs, and chapters could articulate. Such a structure does not so much keep the text together, but rather gives the reader the space to develop, fantasize, or extrapolate a unique world of experience between the sentences, which comes to life in the reader’s activated power of imagination and therefore is also stored in his living memory. Through that structure, we can remember what was in a book we read ten years ago, but not what was in the newspapers or circulating on the Internet at the time. The structure creates the continuity that enable the reader to set aside the book and to pick it up again a few days later and to continue reading without first having to have the whole story or the whole line of reasoning explained again. And because of this, the structure of one book can be part of much larger structures, running from your life as a development and travel adventure demarcated by books to the world literature as a whole or the realization of being part of a human history that, with all respect, is very short compared with the greater history and that greater process in which we are but a link. Thanks to its linearity, a book contains time; that is why people keep books in a special designed cupboard: time past (read books) and time that still awaits, as a promise (a book that has still to be read). A book doesn’t swallow time, as practically all electronic media do; it makes time, it is a time machine.
Arjen Mulder is a media theorist, writer, and editor for V2_Publishing and of De Gids.
Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast, Rapp amp; Whiting Limited, Londen 1970.
44. Shapes – Caroline Nevejan
Clutter
In the summer of my 26th year I completely lost the capacity to read. I had hit my head badly and a severe concussion made me instantly illiterate. As I slowly walked the streets through the heart of Amsterdam in a large hat, I was surprised at how streets appeared to be full of text; I had never realized this before. They were full of cluttered signs randomly organized and blocking the buildings from view. Why do people need so much text? Why do we put it everywhere, as if nothing can be left without a mark?
Blur
After a few days the illiteracy did not disappear and I realized I would have to learn how to read again. But I could not see the shape of signs, I did not recognize any letter. So I started to do Tangram, the game in which you make different shapes with the same 7 pieces. On and off I would try to make shapes and make the same shape again. Slowly I improved. After about a week I opened a Donald Duck magazine. First the exclamations opened up and bit by bit more letters and even words. It was a strange experience that after another week I could read Donald Duck, but at the same time the newspaper still remained a blur. I remembered this experience from when I was a child: learning to read, but not being able to read ‘grown up’ things. Apparently when you cannot handle a more complex level of the same thing, it goes back to the state of blur.
Looking through
So after Donald Duck I went into the women’s magazines and by the time I could read those (advertising especially was fun in the beginning) slowly the newspaper opened up. By
