Daniel

A SEMIOTIC SYMBIOSIS
JUMP-CUT, 199?
Imagine the Internet.
1.5 billion miles of spun glass and copper linking 173 million PCs running quadrillions
of lines of code as quintillions of blips on silicon wafers. How many computations can
dance on the head of a pin? A vast chain of hotlinks.
In his book Mervelous Signals, Eugene Vance writes that "there is scarcely a term,
practice, or concept in contemporary theory that does not have some rich antecedent
medieval thought' This observation seems to apply particularly well in the case
of collaboration between graphic designers and writers. The book, especially the
Medieval book, is a profound virtual-reality device. The image/text, the contempo-
rary reincarnation of illuminated texts, is simply a foregrounding of this multi-
media nature that is original not in our sense of the word, but in the Medieval
sense: that which has been present since the Origin.
t. That is, literature too, has a material history and it is bound up with the history
of the book which is a story of reproducibility and portability. Consider its end
points: the cave painting, a one-of-a-kind, permanently bound to the most inac-
cessible parts of the earth. Contrast this to the Amiens Cathedral (http://www .
1
* learn.columbia.edu ), an online "book" on the cathedral's history and art in which
criticism, primary texts, floor plans, Quicktime movies and a discussion group
can be made present—from anywhere in the world.
Now consider the history between these end points: first the codex, the book
in the shape of a box as opposed to scrolls like one manuscript of the Pentateuch,
written on 57 skins sewn together to form a piece 36 meters long—a serial
retrieval system which one reads by rolling from one scroll to another, like a
cassette tape. With the parallel retrieval system of the codex, though, it's as
easy to flip to page 200 as 20 and back; it is easy to begin to think what we
would call hypertextually. Germane here is the truism that Medievals, like us,
thought in terms of symbols. In a codex like the Moralized Bible, images linked
texts to other texts, the Old Testament to the New. Psalm 80, for example, a
prayer for the restoration of the Lord's Vineyard (Israel) prefigures Christ
and this teleology is taught by a crucifixion posture of both grapes and man.
Pushed to an extreme in the 20th century, it's easy to see what this type of
thinking will do for traditional boundaries: man/machine; history/fiction;
high art/popular entertainment; male/female; truth/image; private/public;
original/copy; mind/body; text/image. Once again, stories and images are
linked to others with the result that, as for Medievals, representation is sus-
pect, for it is partial. The veil that separates us from?—
Today, the re-patterning of knowledge is obviously dear to a number of visual
artists. And activists. And just plain folks.... And, of course, authors and design-
ers. Like perspective painting, the graphically-driven novel is a system of
knowing, one that like the term "narrative," contains within it the collapse of
genres. In fact, hypertext can be seen as a literalization of the type of writing
in the Moralized Bible or any text that points to other texts. Or an image that
points to another image. Or multimedia where one media references another.
The Image/Text is a new, or re-newed, form for revisited means of narration,
means of information organization. Will electric books kill the print book? Well,
did TV. kill radio? Will the creators of all books, the designers and writers (or
should we call them collage artists), have to consider how this experience will
alter the ways stories are told? Well, did TV transform radio?
The push of how we think—especially a mindset that puts genres and media in
discourse—and the pull of technolo are what help brinzword and image together—
in both print and electronic formats. /A ND OF COUPI THIS
RE-IMAGINING IOF THE BOOK Of SE KIAR-
RATIVE FORM IS WHAT IS BRINGING
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS AND WRITERS
BACK TOGETHER.
HEADLINE: ITC CONDUIT BOLD INTRO: ITC GOLDEN COCKEREL ROMAN BYLINE/TEXT: ITC CONDUIT LIGHT, LIGHT ITALIC
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