Showing papers in "Visible Language in 2001"

Interface/an Approach to Design

Abstract: INTERFACE/AN APPROACH TO DESIGN Gui Bonsiepe Maastricht: Jan Van Eyck Akademie, 1999 ISBN 90-6617-212-6 168 pages, softbound, illustrated, one color SCOPE The book is a collection of papers, articles, one interview and conference presentations, mainly written in the nineties, but including a few pieces from the eighties and one from 1965. It touches on many topics, introducing as a consequence a complex picture of the design problem, in a somewhat postmodern fashion. Somewhat postmodern in the sense that there is no clear beginning, middle and end, nor is there any grand plan. The book is a documentation of Bonsiepe's preoccupations about design and designing, the contexts within which design operates and the social forces that affect its purpose and practice. There are several recurring themes and the title suggests the reader might want to focus on the discussion of design as a practice that deals with the connections between users and products, that is, as the creation of interfaces. Indeed, the English version's title is somewhat different from the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese editions, in which the direct translation would be "From the object to the interface." That is, in the other editions the emphasis of the title is on a historical process of change with the concerns in the designer's mind: the move from being interested in the design of objects to becoming interested in the design of the relations between objects and people. The English edition, instead, centers on the design of interfaces (in the broad sense of the term) as a choice, rather than as the result of a historical process. While some articles at the beginning of the book center on the actual design of interfaces for computer programs (42-56), the gist of the book suggests that the design of interfaces (in the sense of points of articulation, bridges or connections) is the ever present problem of the designer, whether dealing with the visual presentation of screens for CDRoms or with agricultural machinery. Bonsiepe's definition of interface in the broad sense appears on page 29: ". . . the interface is not a material object, it is the dimension for interaction between the body, tool and purposeful action. This is not only true of material artifacts, but also for semiotic artifacts, for instance, information in communicative action." The book, however, extends well beyond the title, and wanders through the design territory in a wide exploration of concerns. The author lists seven central topics in the preface: "The reinterpretation of design as 'interface design'; hypermedia as new cognitive technologies; text and visuality; design and language; design education; the role of design in the peripheral world; and development, industrialization and environmental crisis"(8). But it is easy to also recognize other recurrent themes, such as the need for design theory, the economic imbalance between industrialized and less industrialized countries and the problem of cultural identity. A further indication of the thematic breadth of the book is given by the fact that there are twenty-one articles and each article is headed by a title and a list of keywords (one hundred and thirty-nine of them in total). A subject index at the end of the book is a very useful reference. It should also be noted that the material was originally written for seven specialized journals, and for presentations in Brazil, Cuba, Italy, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain and Uruguay. The author, in addition, has lived in Germany, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and the United States, and has been actively involved in educational and governmental institutions in Mexico and Cuba. This wealth of experience brings a cultural and a geopolitical context to the book that strongly frames the nature of its content. This is particularly true when discussing issues of cultural identity and economic imbalance: two concerns that are extremely strong in Latin America and practically nonexistent in the other countries mentioned. …

Diagramming as a Way of Thinking Ecologically

Abstract: Diagrams are frequently used to communicate relationships between multiple dimensions of quantitative information. Attempts are usually made to simplify complex information and to reduce to a minimum the elements considered. Here I will discuss a different breed of diagrams: one that addresses the increasing need to confront complex issues in all their complexity, and that, more than serving to communicate already existing ideas, would serve to explore new ways of organizing knowledge. Several educational and cultural implications of this conception are discussed. INTRODUCTION The topic of this paper is diagramming as a way of thinking. I propose that thinking is highly connected to communication, including communication to oneself, and that, when thinking, processes of visualization alternate with processes of evaluation in a pendular sequence of hunches and judgments in order to build knowledge and opinions. Diagrams are traditionally used in visual communications to present information. This has been widely discussed and their advantages for some applications have been proven many times, paradigmatically by Bertin through his classic example of the hotel manager (figure 1, 1981, vi). Bertin (1983) recognizes three basic functions for diagrams: to record, to understand and to communicate, extending the value of diagrams beyond their more usual function as communication devices (12). Baigie, referring to the illustrations produced by Descartes for his papers on science and mechanics, ponders: "are they merely to help the reader come to grips with the text or, more substantially, are they involved in some way in the creation of knowledge?" (figure 2, 90-91). Much has been discussed about the nature of diagrams, their possible strengths and weaknesses and the cognitive processes involved in both their construction and their decoding. While diagramming as a way of contributing to the process of thinking has been used quite commonly, little of this has been systematically studied, and certainly even less of this has penetrated general education. As a result, picture making has been relegated to self expression and recreation, while verbal language has provided the paradigm for thinking, for reporting on science and for general exchanges of information. The structure of verbal language, however, offers a limited capacity to convey information. It promotes linear thinking and sequentiality, and is very poor for the presentation of hierarchies, inclusions, simultaneity, distinctions of levels, multiplicity of kinds and complexity of connections. While all this can be described verbally, the nature of verbal discourse does not reflect the structure of what is signified. The development of thinking habits in Western education has concentrated on language" and therefore on sequential and unilinear thinking. In the long run, this has limited our capacity to understand serious problems of a physical or social nature due to verbal language's inability to promote the perception of context, complexity and simultaneity - in other words - due to its inability to promote thinking in terms of ecologies of information. This tendency has been possibly fostered by the nature of the verbal language structure, but its influence has also been felt in the terrain of graphic presentations, where simplicity, isolation of variables and reduction of data many times have been pursued as strategies to improve the scientific quality of the graphics developed. In this way the attempt was to produce clarity of information. It is, however, evident, that our world is an integrated system, as can easily be seen now that the natural environment is stressed by human overpopulation, chemical contamination and biological hazards stemming from the need for unprecedented expansion in food production. To discuss diagrams as ways of thinking and to propose the relevance of diagrams for the understanding of certain problems, I will offer three examples. …

On Book Design

Abstract: On Book Design RICHARD HENDEL New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, 210 pages, illustrated, one color, hardbound, $35.00 ISBN 300-07570-7 Most people reading this review will read and handle several books a week. How are these books designed? What do we know about the effective presentation of text? In Richard Hendel's On Book Design there is an opening chapter that discusses these issues, and this is followed by a detailed illustrative example. Eight award-winning designers then describe how they each designed a particular book. The book as a whole is designed by Hendel, and in itself provides a further illustration. There are now (at least) three books like this. In 1965 Marshall Lee edited The Trial of 6 Designers (Hammermill Paper Company). Here six designers presented their solutions for designing the first 24 pages of Kafka's The Trial. (Some extracts are given in Hendel.) And in 1977 William Kaufmann edited One Book/Five Ways (William Kaufmann Inc.). Here five American University Presses outlined their procedures for acquiring, editing, designing and distributing books. All five illustrated how they applied their procedures to the same example text - in this case a book on houseplants These two earlier books, together with Hendel's, differ in many ways. Lee's text is concerned with the design of a novel. Kaufmann's text is about the design of information. Hendel's text offer solutions for a variety of texts, including a textbook, a novel, an exchange of correspondence, an art show catalogue and a poetry collection. In both Lee's and Kaufmann's texts the separate designers worked with the same materials. Thus what the reader sees are differences between design solutions for the same texts. But the methods used for creating the two books are very different. In Lee's text, in contrast to that of Kaufmann: 'Re ground rules were uniform... Copy, size, paper, printer and time available were the same for all; also the requirements that everything be within the practical limits of tradebook publishing.' (9). Thus the differences that appear in Lee's text stem solely from the approaches and styles of the six designers. Table I summarizes some of them. It can be seen that none of the designers used the same typefaces and only two of them used the same setting for the inter-linear space of the body of the text. In Kaufmann's text, although the starting manuscript was the same for each publisher, there were none of the constraints that were imposed in Lee's text. In Kaufmann's text each university press described its own procedures and each designer had a free hand. The reader can make comparisons between costings, production schedules and other features, as well as between specifications for and exampies of the text itself. Table II lists some of the differences between the proposed solutions. There were differences in page-sizes, typefaces, interlinear spacing and methods of binding. However, all five designers specified a two-column unjustified setting, in portrait style. Hendel's text is more like Kaufmann's, in that each of the nine designers in the book made their own decisions. However, here each designer worked on separate texts and all nine were actually published. This contrasts with the examples given in Lee and Kaufmann which, although undoubtedly interesting, present only the results of intriguing exercises. So these three books have many similarities and many differences. Nonetheless, each provides examples of the book designer's art. Furthermore, with Hendel, we have running commentaries by the authors on the processes involved. …

Surrogate Multiplicities: Typography in the Age of Invisibility

Abstract: Historically, much critical discussion, particularly among typographers, has centered on the role typographic form plays in conveying meaning. Beatrice Ward's image of the crystal goblet, evoked in a 1932 essay of the same name created a framework for considering the ways in which value and meaning are assigned to a text based not only on what is written, but how it was written. While Ward was primarily concerned with the dynamics of letterform and legibility, this essay attempts to extend her metaphor into the realm of social difference by exploring the myriad ways in which spaces of cultural inclusion and exclusion are mediated via typographic form. Within such an argument, qualities of transparency and lightness attributed to the crystal goblet operate as agents of invisibility for non-standard speakers, or a whole host of "others" that fall outside of the normal izing boundaries of linguistic standardization supported by Ward's image of an undifferentiated typographic surface. The discussion begins by tracing historical precedents for the marking of social difference through distinctions in typographic form. Typefaces from Jim Crow to Tiki Magic demonstrate how the "display" of otherness relies on the historicizing mechanics of cultural standardization. Similarly, an analysis of pictorial trademarks developed in the mid to late-nineteenth-century reveal how fractured letterforms served as the visual equivalent to the "broken" English of a growing immigrant population. Finally, a connection is made to the ways in which contemporary software, through specified feature sets and "default settings," supports a long traditionl of representational standardization. 1 TRACING THE INVISIBLE Beatrice Ward's 1932 incantation "The Crystal Gopblet" invokes the images of transparency and lightness as purveyors of an enlightened typographic project. Utilizing a form calculated to reveal rather than hide "the beautiful thing which it was meant to reveal the typographic crystal proposed by Ward was not only functional but virtuous as well, implying an inherent, althought hardly unproblematic connection between form and the moral sphere. Historically, much critical discussion, particularly among typographers, has centered on the typographic form plays in conveying meaning, as Ward's valorization of transparency as in means of semantic revelation no doubt demonstrates. Far less attention, however, has been given to an analysis of transparency and lightness as agents, of invisibility for non-standard speakers, or those who fall outside of the frame of "the beautiful thing" Ward's crystal goblet was meant to contain. One way of thinking about this concept of invisibility is to consider the phenomena of the typographic visual "voice-over," which constitutes a national symbolic environment, as well as the organic process by which a standard "voice" is generalized across an entire range of cultural expression. [Template Gothic, Univers, Century Schoolbook] The standard typographic voices we are accustomed to are utopian, belonging nowhere, regionless, without accent. [Helvetica, Bell Gothic, Interstate] Seemingly transparent, these forms offer up representations of the generic, the symbolic, the superficial and the stereotypical. [Citizen, Democratica, Frathouse] In the case of the visual voice-over, language not only marks (or unmarks) identity, but functions as a kind of cultural border as well. As Dick Hebdige notes,"...there can no longer be any absolute distinction between these two terms (form and content) and the primary recognition that the ways in which things are said - the narrative structures employed - impose quite rigid limitations on what can be said.", Taking Hebdige's narrative structures to include both syntactic and semantic elements of the written word, an analysis of the systems of subjectivity at play within typographic discourse can reveal the myriad ways in which visual form supports structures of cultural standardization, marking exclusionary distinctions between standard and non-standard speakers. …

Effects of Minimal Legible Size Characters on Chinese Word Recognition

Abstract: PROQUEST INFORMATION AND LEARNING: FOREIGN CHARACTERS OMITTED. ABSTRACT Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of minimal legible size characters on Chinese word recognition. In Experiment 1, the minimal legible size was determined empirically to be the character size necessary to attain ninety-five percent correct recognition for various Chinese characters which differed in the number of strokes comprising the character, ranging from three to twenty-seven. The results showed that the minimal legible sizes were larger for characters with more strokes. This indicates that characters with more strokes should be enlarged to attain the same recognition performance as that from characters with fewer strokes. Experiment 2 investigated recognition accuracy for a string of minimal legible size characters, versus, conventional equal size characters. The results showed that accuracy rate for the minimal legible size condition was higher than that for the conventional size condition. Although Chinese characters presented with their minimal legible size might change the present word configuration, the results suggest that minimal legible size of characters might help readers recognize words in situations where reading time is extremely short. In particular, the results suggest that minimal legible size Chinese characters may be appropriate in the design of warning or emergency signs. Chapanis (1965) called attention to a very important but often neglected area of human factors: the written information associated with the tools, machines, systems and operations, which have more often been the focus of research. Negligence of this particular issue has continued over the past two decades (Chapanis, 1988). Advances in technology and automation have resulted in the introduction of increasingly complex products, machinery, operational activities and systems that require increasingly more complex written information to communicate between humans and machines. This expansion of information has contributed to the creation of brochures, warning signs, illustrations and operational manuals that are frequently incapable of being adequately understood by their users. The design of such written information for accurate and efficient human processing deserves more study. An important concern regarding the design of written information is legibility. Legibility refers to the ease of identifying individual alphanumeric characters. Poor legibility may result in the information being difficult to read, and thus a deterrent to reading it. Important determinants of legibility are contrast, typographic style and size. Given adequate contrast, legibility is strongly affected by the type style. Much research has shown that character size significantly influences legibility (Chang and Konz, 1993; Imbeau et al., 1989; Joseph and Uhlarik, 1992; Miyao et al., 1988; Silver and Braun, 1993). Some studies (Bouwhuis, 1993; Vigilante and Wogalter, 1998) showed the effect of character size on reading performance was significant for elderly readers. In order to obtain good text legibility, an important question is how large a character must be to be identified and discriminated from adjacent characters. Although extensive guidelines exist with respect to character size, contrast and typography, problematic issues remain concerning the spatial arrangement and characteristics of the elements within a character, in particular, those affecting discriminability of the elements, and thereby the recognition process. In English, each word may fill a different amount of space, for example, the space for "people" is twice that for "the." But, the discriminability for the letters of these two words is probably quite similar. However, written Chinese characters are square-shaped, and all characters occupy equal spaces. Some characters have few strokes, while others have twenty or more strokes. Thus, the discriminability of the strokes that form the equal size characters is different. …

Limits of Language, Limits of Worlds

Abstract: "Limits of Language, Limits of Worlds" sets the stage for the articles that follow. It gives the general rationale for the discussions that formed the impetus for the selection of subjects for papers which include the inherent limitations of expert languages, the need to integrate visual literacy with all literacies that make up a language and its culture, the need for a vibrant cross-disciplinary discourse and the need for exploration of the relationship of theory to practice. "The mediating link between theory and practice, is the human essence -- grounded in human feeling, experience, and intersubjective agreements that cannot be 'universalized' in the logic of the formula." Richard T. Dyro, Semiotician, Life as a Process of Learning, 1982 Introduction The topics for this issue emerged in what one can consider a unique experiment for a beginning academic interdisciplinary discourse. During past semesters the focus of a seminar was to establish an understanding of the differences between the visual literacy competencies needed for machine vision and the production of communicative art objects. A group of researchers in masters and doctoral programs of various disciplines in the arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shared this common seminar. It was moderated at times by Seth Hutchinson, faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Beckman Institute, and two faculty members of the School of Art and Design, Len Singer, professor of industrial and product design and human factors specialist, and Dietmar Winkler, professor of visual design. Participant backgrounds ranged from specializations in communication and advertising, graphic and industrial design, studio arts and art education, and (electronic and time-based) narrative media to psychology and robotics. There was a natural crossover between disciplines, and the diverse group shared its sources, among them Nelson Goodman, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim, for example, as well as texts on perception, optical illusion, optics, neural nets and other related subjects. Certainly, there was awareness of issues in perception and communication framed by the b>avioral and social sciences, but it seemed as if the expert languages of robotics as well as art considered these external and not central to either the making of art objets or to machine vision. Theory and Practice From the very beginning it became clear that theory and practice in art are separated to such an extent that the principles of form making, although applicable and useful to the practice are finally not a measure of either uniqueness, quality or communicative effectiveness or impact, with the result that even if all principles are properly and correctly applied, the communication may be anything other than useful or functioning or a unique and compelling aesthetic statement. In Umberto Eco's vision the universe is made up of chaos and cosmos, of understandable order and of natural, and for the present moment seemingly confusing and not compr>endible, disorder. To combat this destabilizing and debilitating "chaosmos," each discipline has organized itself around specific theories that at least for a short time harden the elasticity of knowledge so that they are enabled to anchor application and implementation in practice. Because of the internal struggles for supremacy, all disciplines are notorious for their inability to share knowledge with another. While an interdisciplinary network is needed from which a multifaceted view of the same world can emerge that is less stilted and segregated, the specialist is ignorant of other branches of knowledge. Finally the specialist is utterly incapable of forming a judgment on the role and importance of his own knowledge within the context of human knowledge and culture. Jurgen Habermas identifies the "professional expertise complex" as a danger and without broad critical thinking skills, yielding each succeeding generation of professionals so entrenched in the execution of their professional roles that they are ill-equipped to have a wider critical view of the world. …

Experimental Poetics Based on Sound Poetry Today

Abstract: After providing three "anti-definitions" which locate sound poetry by specifying what it is not, a new term is introduced, "intersign." Intersign poetry does not priviledge sound, but focuses on new integrative sound-vision presented by technology through digital means. Technology-based poetry is traced to French experiments in the 1950s. Following a brief history of poetic development, intersign poetry is contrasted with sound poetry and positioned relative to multimedia and hypermedia. The engagement of the audience is viewed as a critical component in exploring meaning and sensory development. This text deals with three trends of experimental poetics based on sound poetry today: 1) The return to acoustic experiments; 2 The presence of the body; 3) Hypermedia techniques which develop new ways to construct poems as a mix between sound, verbal and visual elements. To understand the trends of experimental poetics based on sound poetry today, it is necessary first to understand in general what sound poetry is, if not by exactly defining its field, at least by defining what is not contained within it. 1 Sound poetry is not a declamation of a written poem, even if the declamation is an oralization of an experimental written text, for instance, a visual poem. Sometimes a visual poem is taken as a basis for an experimental way of reading aloud that has a distant connection with the visual features. So the reading must be considered a new poem created by the speaker, as in some performances by Lily Greenham. To summarize: sound, in sound poetry, is not the same as the auditory aspect of verbal discourse. 2 Sound poetry is not a text-based poem, where text is conceived as a complex of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels of verbal signs. Even when the reading of a text has as background musical elements disrupting normal oral reading, it is not sound poetry. In another way, it could be said that sound poetry is not a musicalization of a poem. To summarize: sound, in sound poetry, is not an extraneous element of a verbal poem, inserted as a background to its reading; nor is its function to reinforce the text meanings or to illustrate a reading of the text. 3 Sound poetry is not a performance of poetry with decorative sounds derived from the performance. This means that a performance could never be considered as a sound poem when the sound aspects of presentation work only as a collage with the rest of the elements, without a formal organization or a function within the performark; These anti-definitions come from analyzing sound poetics, theoretical statements, manifestos, critical essays on the subject from the nonsense poetry of the end of the nineteenth century to the many types of experimental poetry of the twentieth century. If, however, it is difficult to use the above points to define precisely what sound poetry is, at least they might be useful in distinguishing good from bad sound poems. Nevertheless, maybe as a term, "sound poetry" is to be put aside if we intend to make clear distinctions between a poem that has sound as an internal structural element or a poem in which the sound aspects are simple derivation from the verbal signs or incidental and dispensable elements. It may be a fact that "sound poetry," as formulated by Henri Chopin in the 196os and widely used all over the world, is losing its capacity to define a poetics. 1 Many poets of different countries have adopted it to name their poems, most of them, applying it to poems that could be included in the three categories noted above. In Brazil, for instance, after my introduction of sound poetry in the beginning of the 1990s, with a book (1992), poems (1993/94) and radio broadcasting series (1994), sound poetry as a term provoked controversial disputes between visual poets who intended to demonstrate how their visual poems were "potentially" sound, even if printed (and silent). …

Critical Viewing of Television

Abstract: Television provides people in technological societies with information of a completely different character than any other media. Compared to the activities of reading or normal interaction with our environment, the act of watching television is characterized by very little cognitive involvement of the viewer. Whether it is advertisements, sitcoms or even educational programming, the way that television is used to convey information inhibits the viewer's ability to critically challenge the information they are receiving. I propose two possibilities for television viewers to overcome this impediment to cognition - the first is to develop a personal means of facilitating a critical evaluation of the information presented on television, sometimes called critical viewing. The second possibility emerges from further advancements in technology where the viewer is enabled to take a more controlling and interactive role in the information they are receiving. The dominant form of graphic mass media in our society is television. Because of the way in which this medium presents information, cognitive responses by the viewer are hindered. Mechanisms are used in the production of television to inhibit long-term storage and critical evaluation of the information presented. To assume that a viewer's purpose may be to cognitively analyze what they are watching as opposed to just wanting to be entertained, I will investigate and propose actions that can be taken the next time one decides to watch television. Last I'll explore the possibilities for new technology to enhance television and create new forms of graphic mass communication that will encourage the viewer to use their cognitive abilities. As everything is relative, I'll compare and contrast two other common situations in which we receive information: reading and normal interaction with our environment. The two principle ways in which television hinders the viewer's ability to use cognitive functions are that it impedes long term storage and makes other functions such as imagination and planning nearly obsolete. In order to be able to perform cognitive tasks on the visual information we receive, we need to be able to recall it from our long-term memory. The problem with television is not that there is too much information present, as whenever our eyes are open we are receiving at least as much input. In order to deal with reception of massive amounts of information, we filter out much of what we see by focusing our attention. However, television's constant motion and scene switching grabs our attention, preventing us from focusing on any one thing for very long. As Singer points out, "Human beings are, in effect, `wired up' to make a response to any sudden, new, and unexpected stimulation that occurs in the environment. This is called 'orienting reflex' and insures our safety since it makes certain that we will react suddenly and effectively to any major change that confronts us" (Singer, 37). This, combined with the fact that our short-term memory is very vulnerable to interference from continued input (Singer, 38) leads to the conclusion that the manner in which material is presented on television impedes our long-term storage of the information that it exposes us to. Singer states: "This is a basic problem with the television medium. It is in effect introducing us constantly to new material before we have had a chance to grasp either the printed or verbal and auditory material being presented, and as a result it yields a high rate of information loss" (Singer, 53). Compounding this effect is the absence of time for reflection on the information given to us. In Posner's study of visual short-term memory, he cites Waugh and Norman's (1965) model of memory which states that "...the effect of r>earsal is to present an opportunity for information to be sampled from the short to the long-term store" (Posner, 55). Posner also refers to research by Sperling (1963) and Conrad (196o) which shows that this r>earsal is only effective for helping long term storage if it is done before the capacity of short term memory is reached (Posner, 55) - Sperling's work on the capacity of visual information store finds that when presented with 12 symbols for 50 milliseconds, the subjects of his test could recall about 9. …

Some Things That Pictures Are Good For: An Information Processing Perspective

Abstract: Our visual experience of the world is extremely limited in scope both spatially and temporally. This is due to extreme restrictions on our visual attention, our region of high resolution within the field of view and our visual short-term memory, as shown by research on visual perception and memory. However, we have developed very efficient ways of dealing with these limitations. One biologically based scheme is to make rapid eye movements around our visual environment several times per second. This allows us to attend to items in our visual environment serially that we could not attend to simultaneously, and allows us to refresh our leaky visual short-term memories at the same time. A second entirely human invention is to make and view pictures. Pictures have a great capacity for allowing us to direct a person's attention to things they might not have noticed. Pictures also allow us the time to carefully explore visual information by attending to details that otherwise might have disappeared in our ever-changing world. Likewise. because pictures can hold information in a stable form, we don't have to use our limited visual short-term memories to hold onto their contents. Instead, we have the potential to repeatedly look back at any detail whenever the need arises in order to more deeply process its contents without loss of information due to the image changing. In this way, pictures facilitate our contemplation of visual information. Of course, pictures do not remove the inherent limitations on our visual attention. resolution and short-term memory, as clearly shown in the pictorial demonstrations contained id in this article. However, pictures do extend out abilities to deal with these limitations in ways that greatly enrich our visual experience. Human Perceptual and Cognitive Limitations Those of us blessed with sight live in a rich visual world full of shapes, colors and lines, objects, people and events. Our eyes provide us with new visual information on an almost continuous basis.1 And, though we rarely stop to think about it, most of us, if asked, would probably say that we are well aware of what is in our immediate surroundings - our visual environment - at any given moment. But psychological research on human perception over the last few decades has come to show that our visual experience of the world is in fact quite limited. If the last statement above strikes you as obscure, it is quite understandable because most of the time we are completely unaware of how little visual information we are able to take in or hold onto. Nevertheless, a wealth of research suggests that our visual experience has the following characteristics: 1) Visual attention is extremely limited. We pay attention to (and thus consciously experience) only a very limited number of things in our visual environment at any given moment. Those things which we do not attend to can go completely unnoticed even when they are literally right in front of our eyes.This phenomenon has been shown experimentally and is known as "inattentional blindness."2 In a number of such experiments, a simple visual stimulus (e.g., a small black square, or a white circle, roughly the width of a pencil at arm's length) could be briefly flashed on a computer screen (for about 1/5 of a second) exactly at the center of vision (i.e., directly where participants were looking) and never be noticed by the majority of viewers, if they were doing a task that required them to pay attention elsewhere. Later, after the same people had been tested once in this way and were now more wary, when such a stimulus was flashed again, virtually all of them could correctly identify its shape and location.3 While such a result may come as a shock at first, it should really come as no surprise based on personal experience. Most of us can probably remember looking in vain for something, perhaps our keys or wallet, only to find after near exasperation that what we were looking for was in plain sight the whole time ("It was right in front of my nose")! …

Alphabet to Email-How Written English Evolves and Where It's Heading

Abstract: Alphabet to Email - How written english evolved and where it's heading. NAOMI S. BARON London: Routledge, 2000, 316 pages, $18.95 ISBN 0-415-18655-4 Running through this book are questions regarding the cultural, monetary, scholastic and vernacular uses of the English language as it has continued to evolve over centuries. The author is a linguist with substantial interest in and knowledge of history and technology. She writes in an accessible manner appropriate to this hybrid book which is a cross between a trade and scholarly book (endnotes and a substantial bibliography). The primary question this book addresses is what (if anything) we gain from the former separation between the differences between formal, written English and the more informal, colloquial spoken English. Her position is that the advent of email has blurred the edges of these two forms of usage. "Since World War II, written English (at least in America) has increasingly come to reflect everyday speech. While writing on-line with computers has hastened this trend, computers didn't initiate it. As writing growingly mirrors informal speech, contemporary spoken and written English are losing their identity as distinct forms of language. "(24) The answer to the primary question - should the difference between speaking and writing be appreciated and maintained - has pedagogical implications. This is a time of turmoil and doubt in the teaching of English. Of what value is teaching the history of English? Should a prescriptive grammar be taught? Is punctuation based on speech patterns (breathing) or should it be a means to reveal the structural characteristics of the sentence? Is the focus on group composition detrimental to the development of individual competence and style? Does online composition and language processing mirror or change more traditional forms of writing and reading? Should one set of English conventions serve as a worldwide norm? From the perspective of history, the reader is given insightful connections between historic change and its relation to various combinations of human interpretation and b>avior and technological development. Historical information about copyright and ownership and its relationship to censorship speak to our current confusions in this regard. The notion of authorship and originality as it developed in the past speaks to our current use of appropriation and even the theoretical arguments about the interrelatedness of all text. What was and currently is an authoritative text? Even dictionaries have changed from arbiters of usage to that of descriptive record of use. Attempted reforms of spelling and handwriting accompany elocution and the differing attitudes among British and American speakers regarding what is correct and marks class. As English is evolving into a world language, the preservation or extinction of local ideosyncracies (British-American- Canadian-AustralianESL) provide either fodder for arguments regarding standardization or elaboration. Conditions fascilitating the rise of literacy offer contrast as some decry its demise. From the perspective of technology, the reader is offered not only technical development and deployment, but the effect technology has on social and private b>aviors. The radio, typewriter, telegraph, telephone and computer all figure prominently in this discussion. An example of the kind of information one might find follows, referencing the possibility of installing a house telegraph: "A similar vision did, in fact, materialize two decades later. In 1877, the Social Telegraph Association the ancestor of computer listservs -was created in Brideport, Connecticut. The Association installed instruments in subscribers' homes that could be connected, through a central switchboard, to one another so that subscribers could 'speak' to one another through Morse Code once they had been taught how. " (219) The telegraph did alter language use as a kind of "cablese," a short, highly abbreviated message cut transmission costs for the sender. …

Experimental Poetry in Barcelona during the 1990s

Abstract: The path that represents the experimentation of poetry enriched with other elements, gathering literatire in a shape that will transcend the traditional literary code, we do not know where it can take us, but what makes it interesting is the surprise of creation. Joan Brossa Under the label of experimental poetry, a lot of poetic tendencies are fostered: sound poetry, phonetic poetry, concrete poetry, visual poetry, object poetry, video poetry, action poetry in conclusion, poetry. It is a poetry that tends to blend more and more different artistic disciplines and delete the presupposed frontiers with which orthodoxy resolves to speak about art. Maybe that is why the term "polypoetry" has had such influence in Catalonia during the 1990's, since 1987, the year in which the Italian poet Enzo Minarelli first published the "Manifesto of Polypoetry" in the catalogue Tramesa dArt in Valencia. Because polypoetry is conceived and carried out for live performances and because, taking as a basis sound poetry, it represents the inter-related starting point between this and all other remaining forms of art. The fact that this article focuses on experimental poetry in the city of Barcelona (implying the rest of Catalonia as well), specifically during the 1990s, has two basic premises. First of all, Barcelona has always had an important poetic activity. Secondly, the last decade has seen a great momentum for expansion of this type of activity marked by two constants: the mixing of artistic disciplines and the aim to spread poetry so that it can reach a live audience. It is significant, in the year 2000, to give a panoramic vision of the ten previous years in the field of the poetic experimentation, focusing on live performances. The 1990s were an expansive decade, but it must be emphasized that the beginning of this period of experimental poetry progress lies in the work carried out by previous poets, some with certain recognition such as joan Brossa, Guillem Viladot and even Caries Hac Mor, and others more underground, without well-known publishers and with no media attention. This is the case of Xavier Sabater,2 diffuser of polypoetry in Catalonia and in Spain, or the poetry group made up by Enric Casassas (figure i), Jordi Pope, Jaume Sisterna, Joan Vinuesa, Albert Subirats, and others, closely related to libertarian tendencies, who represented the alternative to the official poetry. They have made up for difficulties in publishing by bringing poetry to the people, holding readings in bars, theaters or prisons. It is worth mentioning that this poetic period of progress during the 1990s took place thanks to the initiative of some of the same poets, who were organizing the meetings, recitals and poetry series/cycles, carrying out publishing projects and magazines, and encouraging diffusion of the poetry. In order to give a global vision of this full-of-intersections decade, some of the most significant events follow. In June 1989 in the Artual Galery of Barcelona, the "Concentraci6 de Poesia Total" (Total Poetry Concentration) took place. Caries Hac Mor, a poet formed in conceptual art and member of the "Grup de Treball" during the 1970s, was one of the organizers. In an article of El Pats about the event, Hac Mor summarized the philosophy that motivated it and forthcoming ones: the participation of many people belonging to different generations, spontaneity, improvisation, approach, exchange and relation between those working in plastic arts, music, performance and word. Through a card widely issued by the Artual Gallery, four poets have invited everyone to participate in a Concentraci6 de Poesia Total that will take place there, summoning publicly about 70 poets, expoets, dis-poets and para-poets. All this illustrates a good example of total chaos, not frightening, and either wished or not wished by the organizers. What's more, they think that, even though the Concentration does not rule out serious performances at all, the main performances will be humorous, absurd, maybe some of them will become true nonsense[ . …

The Manifesto of Polypoetry

Abstract: Ten years after its writing, the Manifesto of Polypoetry is examined anew. The original goal of the manifesto was to theorize the performance of sound poetry. Six statements from the manifesto are examined in the context of a decade of change and development. The importance of technology is restated along with a discussion of time, editing, rhythm and poetic practitioners associated with excellence in various techniques or perspectives. THIS ATTEMPT CONSISTS, AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE, IN RENEWING THE POINTS OF THE MANIFESTO.1 THE NEED TO THEORIZE THE PERFORMANCE OF SOUND POETRY, STILL EXISTS. NOBODY, SAVE IN A VERY FEW CASES, HAS FELT THE URGENCY OF MAKING CLEARER THE PROCEDURE OF A MATTER STILL PRACTISED. PERHAPS IT'S DIFFICULT TO FIND THE NEW PRACTITIONERS, AS NOWADAYS IT SEEMS THAT ONLY THE MOST SOPHISTICATED HYPER-TECHNOLOGY AND VIOLENCE AGAINST THE BODY ITSELF (ALSO TRANSFIGURED OR CREATED THROUGH GENETIC MANIPULATION) ARE THE UNIQUE, AUTHORIZED WAYS OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH. THE INTENTION IS TO HELP THOSE WHO ARE EXPERIMENTING, WITH PERMANCES OF SOUND POETRY, TO A BETTER AWARENESS OF WHAT THEY ARE PRODUCING. SUCH AN IMPRESSION IS STILL VIABLE TODAY. BY AWARENESS I MEAN THE CAPABILITY OF A PROJECT ABLE TO ORGANIZE A SERIES OF INTERVENTIONS AROUND THE NUCLEUS OF THE VOICE INVOLVING OTHER MEDIA WITHOUT GOING TOWARDS PERFORMANCE ART, EXPERIMENTAL THEATER, CONCRETE MUSIC OR, WORSE, THE MERE READING OF A POEM FROM THE PAGE. IT WAS NECESSARY THEN, AND A HIGH LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNEES IS STILL REQUIRED NOW, TO MANAGE SUCH A COMPLEX OF MULTIPLE ELEMENTS. 1 Only the development of new technologies will mark the progress of sound poetry: electronic media and computers are and will be the true protagonists. This was an easy prophecy! During the 1950s, the invention of the recording technique and its immediate commercialization deeply influenced and accelerated the transition from phonetic poetry to sound poetry, or better said, the change from the typical lettrist approach to a more spatial, electromagnetic sound. The same can't be said after the appearance of the computer on the art scene towards the end of the 1980s. No doubt production times are neatly shortened, it's easier to work with special effects, to control sound waves. But the final product, the sound poem, has not been improved either in structure or contents. The end-of-the-century big-computer-bang has not provoked a wave of "new" sound poetry. Those who have always used technology for the composition of the poem, still go on exploiting it, maybe in a more sophisticated way (see Larry Wendt, Charles Amirkhanian and Sten Hanson, for example). Or one might mention the extreme technological coherence of a Henri Chopin who, at least for forty years, has been proposing a rarefied style, not so far from a phonetic "rumorismo." Other poets who first denied their involvement with hyper-tech recording studios, now are not afraid of it and click the mouse to select their recorded voice finally visualized on the screen. Still covinced that the fundamental help of technology is necessary to the cause of sound poetry, this is the winning instrument. The sound poet must be prepared in the face of rapid electronic development, but must also experiment with the new media for the progress of the sound poem itself. In other words, the sound poet must consider the poem under the auspices of the new technology. We ought to avoid that unbearable situation so typical of controlled freedom, where we seem to do whatever we want to, but we do nothing of any interest or better yet we do only what others allow us to do. That's why we appreciate those poets or investigators who have been able to set up their own software, Tibor Papp, Jacques Donguy, Fabio Doctorovich or those who can wholly dominate the program they are using, exploiting it for an original process, Mark Sutherland, Philadelpho Menezes, Takei Yoshimichi, Suzuki Takeo. Finally, some thoughts about the Web, which is not yet ready to be exploited for the creative purpose of producing sound poetry. …

Relations between Sound Poetry and Visual Poetry: The Path from the Optophonetic Poem to the Multimedia Text

Abstract: A brief history of the development of scores for sound poetry during the twentieth century is presented The work of Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters is the focus for the early part of the century From mid-century to end, the work of Franz Mon, Carlfriedrich Claus and Valeri Scherstjanoi is the focus Any attempt to distinguish between sound poetry and visual poetry is extremely difficult, for according to Reinhard Doehl's definition visual texts are sound texts without a sound In other words visual texts are a sort of orchestral "score" for a sound text Futurist and dadaist sound poets have rightly stressed the difficulties to represent sound texts, as they approach the border of a semantic absence of meaning with regard to the nuances of sound But it was not until the invention of the tape recorder (in the fifties) which paved the way to solve the problem how to represent sound texts The tape recording makes the original repetition of a once formed, perhaps even spontaneously formed, sound event available to us and offers the sound poet new methods of composing his texts similar to the methods of creating a film After all the authentic sound poetic work only does exist in a tape recorded form1 The techniques of computer sampling in the area of sound and refined video techniques in the visual area brought an enormous increase of audiovisual methods to recording Nevertheless German sound poets hardly make use of these techniques today The aim of this essay is to present an annotated historical survey regarding the "scores" of sound poetry But in doing so Bernd Scheffer points out a restriction: It's rather pointless to talk continuously of wordless, pre-verbal or nonverbal perceptions within a visual area The syntax of the visual area In 1910 Guillaume Apollinaire propagated the use of phonographs to record the voices of poets The Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti developed his strategy of "liberation of words" (parole in liberto), which was expected to produce the following effects: * to set free words and sounds on the surface of a sheet of paper or in acoustic space * to rediscover the spoken word for poetry and to use sounds of the world around us (onomatopoeia) In the wake of Stephane Mallarme, Marinetti revolutionized typography The visual organization of the tavole parolibere was characterized by "freely" spreading out scraps of sentences, single words and asyntactical groups of words or isolated letters The arrangement produced the effect that those scraps of sentences, single words, etc fit into expressive and often semantic, pictorial configurations - the spatial constellation produced the meaning and the context Traditional grammatical syntax is replaced by spatial syntax As the antitraditional and revolutionary use of typographic design produces a peculiar visual effect of expression - containing also acoustic qualities -- the text is approaching the picture and the musical "score" thus transcending the borders of music and pictorial and fine arts Sound poems: Hugo Ball The dadaist poet Hugo Ball knew the first examples of the tavole parolibere of the Italian futurists Yet the "typographic revolution" was not reflected in his poems On July 23, 1916 he recited for the first time his "Karawane" (Caravan), also called "Elefantenkarawane" (Elephant Caravan), together with other sound poems in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich The different written versions of this sound poem were only authorized in the typescript, which is included in the manuscript edition of the Gesammelte Gedichte (Collected Poems),2 whereas Ball didn't authorize the two "extra" elaborated versions of this poem for the publication in the Dada-Almanach planned by Kurt Wolff and in the Dada-Almanach edited by Richard Huelsenbeck and published by Erich Reiss, Berlin, in 19203 The visual version of the sound poem "Karawane" (figure i) is characterized by its headline, which seems to be in motion, and the use of different types of writing in the seventeen lines of the text …