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Paris
Connection is
co-produced and co-published by Arteonline.arq.br
(Rio), Coriolisweb.org
(Toronto), dichtung-digital.org
(Berlin), Turbulence.org
(New York). It contains introductions to,
interviews with, and reviews on: Jean-Jacques
Birgé, Nicolaus Clauss,
Frédéric Durieu, Jean-Luc Lamarque,
Antoine Schmitt, Servovalve. For French, Portuguese
and Spanish version see: http://vispo.com/thefrenchartists.
The version on dichtung-digitial is made possible
by ZKM. | Birgé | Clauss | Durieu | Lamarque | Schmitt | Servovalve |
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REVIEW on
Servovalve by
Carrie Noland Child
psychologists approximate that an American child spends the
largest part of her time between the ages of 5 and 8
mastering the rudiments of these culturally privileged arts
[1].
The acquisition of literacy is a painful and arduous
process, a discipline in the strongest sense. It is no
accident that literacy training appears in Michel Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish as the exemplary disciplinary
occasion, one in which the kinetic body is produced by the
tasks it is called on to perform [2].
Although Foucault’s interest is in the seventeenth
century, the scenario he describes is applicable to our time
as well. The skill of correct handwriting was one of the
many theatres of corporeal discipline that arose during the
seventeenth century, a period so relentlessly dedicated to
standardizing the unruly, libidinal body. Not only were the
hands and fingers carefully choreographed by vigilant
instructors of orthography, but elbows, spine, feet, and
even stomach, too, were forced to coordinate their movements
and maintain predetermined and conventionalized positions
with respect to one another. “A
well-disciplined body form[ed] the operational
context of the slightest gesture,” Foucault recounts,
and thus good handwriting during that period—and,
ostensibly, during our own—“presupposes a
gymnastics—a whole routine whose rigorous code invests
the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the
tip of the index finger” [3]. Learning to
read, cognitive scientists have found, is no less rigorous;
reading impacts the body—and of course the mind—in
ways researchers in a variety of fields are still trying to
understand [4].
A study conducted in the 1980s demonstrates that learning to
read, although normally an activity requiring less corporeal
investment than learning to write, actually has effects on
the nervous system that are long-lasting rather than
confined solely to those moments spent in acts of reading
[5].
For instance, the eye movements of a child only just
beginning to recognize letters will be exceedingly erratic;
the eye races up and down, to the side, and at oblique
angles in a pattern that resembles more closely the pattern
present when examining a large field of visual information.
In other words, the child looks at a text in the same way
she looks at a drawing, or at the world itself. The eye
movements have not yet been tamed, regulated, disciplined to
accommodate the efficient reading process. However, as a
child learns to read more quickly, the eye movements fall
into a tightly restricted pattern, fluctuating between a
smaller and smaller range of highs and lows, and hardly ever
gliding to the side. Such learned, but unconscious and
involuntary control of eye movements accompanies the
cognitive acquisition of the skills of reading. And this
alteration of the physical body, the kinetic body, and the
nervous system itself, is permanent. The child can now “read”
according to a more precise, but limited pattern of visual
information retrieval. I cite this experiment in
order to bring home the point that reading is a type of
training that not only produces a reader, but also produces
a text. In other words, the letters on the page that are
confronted by the illiterate or barely literate child
are not the same letters on the page that are
confronted by the literate child. The previous letters were
lines and shapes as well as letters. They were houses and
trees and snakes before they were H’s and T’s
and S’s. They were drawings before they were the
particles of words, icons before they were signs, because
that is how the eye looked at them. The moving,
erratic, busy, intuitive eye, the curious and hungry eye,
did not yet know what it was looking at, did not yet know
how to look at what it was looking at. The physical eye had
not yet become a trained, acculturated eye, and the text was
not a static set of letters but instead a moving, animated,
self-transforming screen for the imagination. |
“nurb” is poetic to the degree that it remains fascinated with the graphic materiality of inscription, and with this materiality’s most fundamental units: letters. What "nurb" develops is the insight that, at its most decomposed level, a letter is a set of lines, horizontal, vertical, oblique, and curvaceous, and that a depiction, at its most decomposed level, is a set of letter-like lines, or that it depends upon the same linear and curvaceous forms as the characters of a language. |
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As Joan
Brooks McLane explains in Early Literacy, small
children do not distinguish between drawing and writing. And
in fact, as educators now recognize, many “pre-literacy”
skills are acquired through imaginative activities involving
paint, crayons, magic markers, and make-believe play
[6].
Researchers have long known that the child’s
earliest attempts to write take the form of “griffonnages,”
seminal scratchings that can lead either to the embryonic
characters of a language or, alternatively, to depictions,
letters or lines [7].
The teleology of culture demands that we see the child’s
acquisition of literacy—and therefore her reduction of
lines to letters and depictions to characters—as
progress. The child has learned to read; the eyes have been
stilled; and the bulk of the child’s adult life will
henceforth be spent reading and writing texts rather than
viewing or making drawings. And this, for the authors of
texts at least, is a good thing. After all, authors need
readers. Rarely has an author—and here my focus will
be on the authors of poems—lamented the acquisition of
literacy, for, in order to be understood and appreciated,
the text requires mastery of specifically the kinds of
discipline that end up de-privileging or eliminating
entirely the kinetic and visual properties of marks on the
page. What is so revolutionary
about digital poetry, in contrast to the poetries of the
past, is the remarkable degree to which it insists upon
those very capabilities that have been either lost or merely
suppressed in our “progress” toward literacy.
Similar in this regard to concrete and visual poetries,
digital poetry also reawakens the eye, encouraging us to
experience the letter as a visual unit.
However, digital poetry goes even further in
transgressing the boundary between the matter and meaning,
drawing and inscription. By integrating animation, digital
poems restore to letters the earlier kinesis they once
enjoyed [8].
In many digital poems, letters move; they are displaced,
they appear at any point on the page/screen, thereby
reinventing their support as an illusionist,
three-dimensional field, or as film stock, unraveling in
time. As Stephanie Strickland states
elegantly, digital works play on the “view/read cusp”;
“whereas sound layered on sound creates new sound,” she
notes, “and image on image makes a new image,
alphabetic text, superimposed on alphabetic text or
on image, does not reliably yield legible text. & one
flickers between seeing the viewable and reading the legible”
[9].
(See article Concrete
Poetry in Analog and Digital
Media in Paris
Connection) It is specifically this “flickering”
or “oscillation” between an inscription’s
two distinct phenomenological modes of being—viewable
or legible—that the French artist, Servovalve,
exploits in the work entitled “"nurb"”—to
which I shall presently turn. For those of you less
familiar with recent innovations in digital poetry, I want
first provide a rough and rapid taxonomy. Not all digital
poetry emphasizes either the visual or the kinetic aspects
of the letter. There is a large body of work that is nothing
more than print-based poetry that has been distributed
on-line. A Website such as Ubu.com,
for instance, faithfully gathers together and “publishes”
on-line the most interesting innovative poetry from the
beginning of this century up to the current moment. But much
of this work does not take advantage of the digital medium.
A second category of digital poetry would be poems
distributed on the web that have not been previously
published, and therefore take advantage of the immediacy and
large-scale dissemination that the web provides, but
nonetheless fail to employ any of the other advantages of
the digital medium. Any word processor could produce these
kinds of poems on ubiquitous software such as Microsoft
Word. (And one thinks here of Alan Sondheim, who distributes
several poems a day on a listserve run by Jim Andrews called
“webartery.”) Poems composed with HTML, DHTML or
Javascript code manipulation would constitute the third
category of digital poetry. These are poems that are
generated either by playing with code in an intentional
manner (producing pre-conceived effects in a controllable
way) or by programming an algorithm and seeing the aleatory
textual results. The fourth and broadest
category of digital poetry is the one that I want to focus
on here. Although I will be confining myself to a discussion
of FRENCH digital poetry, it should be understood that the
poems I’m examining are part of a transnational body
of work evolving over time within a tradition of innovative
textual manipulation that is only just beginning to theorize
itself (to construct a poetics) and to archive itself (to
determine a canon). This fourth category is what I will call
“animated” digital poetry. The works in this category
generally employ one of two readily available software
animation programs: Flash or Director.
Director was the first to come on the scene in 1987
(followed by Flash in 1996 or 97). Both allow users to make
letters move around the screen, morph, change size, font,
and color. It also allows for viewers to interact with the “text,”
transporting words or letters from one place on the screen
to another by dragging the mouse, or making them disappear
and reappear by clicking the mouse. Digital poems animated
with Flash or Director tend to resemble short
animated films in which the words or letters move about like
cartoon characters. A relatively sophisticated
example would be Philippe Castellin’s “La
Poésie est la somme”,
in which words of the same font but different colors—such
as “infini,” “l’étroit,”
“toujours,” “formes,” “l’intérieur”
and so on (as well as the author’s name and the date
of the poem’s composition—1999)—float
around the screen in directions and at a pace determined by
a pre-programmed algorithm. The words—all appearing in
upper case letters—circulate for a while, then cease
moving abruptly and hold their positions for three seconds,
just long enough to create a visual impression for the
viewer but not long enough to provide a readable text. The
viewer responds to the kinetic quality of the radiant words
by following their movement with her eyes, thus tracing out
a variety of optical paths that a “normal” text
would never produce. The learned response to text is
challenged, un-done by the addition of animation. When the
words finally stop moving, the viewer seizes a kind of
snap-shot of the whole even as she focuses, perhaps, on one
or two words that shimmer into legibility. Thus, the poem
never seems to contain the same words twice, and the visual
aspect of the poem in its entirety never resolves into a
stable entity. Presumably the permutations of the syntax,
the content, and the visual aspect of the poem are
limitless. The viewer is “reading,”
in a sense, but also struggling to go beyond the acquired
habits of reading to make sense of a text—as a visual
and kinetic object—that refuses to settle into what
Paul de Man might have called a “totalizing metaphor,”
remaining caught instead in seemingly limitless metonymic
extensibility [10]. Director
can produce results that present an even greater challenge
to the acquired habits of the literate viewer than
Flash tends to. While Flash creates simple
animations, similar to those used for film titles, for
instance, Director can be used to program long-term
sequences involving a greater variety of transformations of
characters and their interaction with images
[11].
Director is generally employed when an author wants
to blur the distinction between text and image.
This blurring, of course, already occurs as soon as the
letters of the word begin to float, revolve, vibrate, or
displace themselves (either through interactive procedures
or according to pre-programmed codes). But far more dramatic
permutations of text can be achieved when the transition
between a line and a letter occurs smoothly in a temporal
continuum. Flash animations tend to be jerky and
jumpy as letters appear and just as suddenly disappear, or “flash”
on and off the screen. In contrast, Director
animations exploit the continuity they can achieve between
one phase of a letter’s appearance and the
next. Both types of animation
share a propensity, however, to privilege the letter over
the word as the salient element of composition. Jim Andrews,
a Canadian web artist, explains why: Thus, a graphic artist—such
as Andrews—is much more likely to concentrate
programming resources on those elements of written language
that have visual interest: the more varied graphic “character”
of letters accordingly brings them into prominence in
digital poetry. It could be said that digital poets write
poems with letters, not words, and that “reading”
such digital poetry becomes a matter of attending
simultaneously to the graphic materiality of the letter
and its phonetic or semantic value as it appears in
a word. In
"nurb,"
the digital poem I want to focus on before concluding,
servovalve (pseudonym for the French author-programmer
Gregory Pignot) [13]
has mobilized temporality to lead the viewer from one type
of viewing practice—reading in the more restricted,
conventional sense—to another kind of viewing practice—watching,
or reading visual images in the larger, less semiotically
rigorous sense [14].
“Nurb” is in fact based on the play between these two
types of reading, and the two types of inscriptions that
correspond to them respectively. The author continually
challenges the distinction between lines used to write
letters and lines used to produce depictions. Composed of
ten discrete sections, “nurb” constitutes one of
the most extreme examples of a digital poetry drawn
precariously toward the pole of graphic art. Some scholars might even
question whether it should be called a “poem” in
the first place. (It has no overt “semantic”
content.) Yet I would argue that “nurb” is
poetic to the degree that it remains fascinated with the
graphic materiality of inscription, and with this
materiality’s most fundamental units: letters. What “nurb”
develops is the insight that, at its most decomposed level,
a letter is a set of lines, horizontal, vertical, oblique,
and curvaceous, and that a depiction, at its most decomposed
level, is a set of letter-like lines, or that it depends
upon the same linear and curvaceous forms as the characters
of a language. The first three sections of
the “poem”—entitled “iiiii”,
“x-liner”,
and “electrotomy”—investigate
verticality and horizontality, and contrast these types of
linear inscriptions with spirals or unpredictable, erratic
lines that suggest depth in three dimensions as opposed to
the flat surface of a page. Section four, "carbon",
abruptly introduces another kind of line, a rapidly moving
squiggly line evocative of the tiny motor movements involved
in handwriting. However, here, it turns out that this kind
of line is constitutive of nothing other than a
representational depiction. The viewer waits patiently as
four or five squiggly lines fill in the black screen with
white contours, producing over time the full portrait of a
human face. Each time the process is re-initiated, the lines
begin at a different point on the face (and I believe they
depict a different face, as well). Just as pixels are the
constitutive units of a cartoon face (and, in fact, if you
stare long enough at any screen you eventually identify the
individual pixels of an image), so, in this case, the line
is revealed to be the constitutive element of the
depiction. Section five, “ohon”,
works to blur the distinction between printed font,
handwriting, and abstract linear forms. In the middle of a
black screen, words referring to what sound like
pharmaceuticals—Thoridazine, Teldane, Droleptan,
Quinidine, acide aminé, acide formique—flash
on, then dissolve into bars of light, are struck by flying
line fragments, or become the pivots around which an
illegible figure, resembling a handwritten word, spins. At
certain points, the shooting line fragments slow down enough
to be recognized as words, and the bars of light resolve
into recognizable lettering. The viewer’s
reading strategies are thus taxed to the limit. Not only
must the eyes constantly flit around the screen erratically
in order to “read” the words, but the very point
at which letters become legible is the site of a
readjustment, an anamorphic rupturing, a split-second switch
of gears from operating within what Jean-Francois Lyotard
has called “l’espace figural” (in which
one finds images) to operating within “l’espace
graphique” (in which one finds text) [15]. The remaining sections six
through ten (“lignedefuite”;
“go.s.cell”;
“fil”;
“erdro”;
"cone82")
involve interactive procedures; the viewer can alter the
activity or the directionality of the shapes and lines by
dragging the mouse. In two of these sections--#8 (“fil”)
and #9 (“erdro”)—the reader/viewer can
actually “write” on the screen. As the viewer
drags the mouse to the left in “fil,” the line
is extended to the left, while in “erdro,” the
movement of the viewer’s fingers is recorded as a
series of vectors radiating out from the point where the
movement began. In this way, writing (here, on the screen)
is explicitly reconnected to the kinetic body of the viewer.
Movement is evoked as rhythmic inscription, as the trace of
the body’s force exerted upon a surface. The viewer
ends up “reading” not a text, but the movements
of his or her own digits (and, by extension,
limbs). Thus, in works like
Servovalve’s “nurb”, reading in the
traditional sense is both solicited and put to the test. The
regulated, disciplined linear movement of the eye is
challenged by less conventional “reading”
practices, equally necessary for interpreting the screen but
engaging at the same time activities associated more closely
with viewing and touching. The eye is, in a sense, liberated
from the constraints placed on it by traditional acts of
reading. To this extent, digital poetry calls for a process
of de-skilling: “readers” of these “texts”
are being asked to break the patterns of visceral response
that they have taken such trouble to acquire. Yet at the
same time, digital poetry calls for a process of
re-skilling; it demands the acquisition of new
skills. Reading poetry on the web—especially poetry
created for the web—will very likely teach us
a whole new way of reading, and, by doing so, will provoke
an interrogation of the boundary between the letter and the
image, the eye and the body, the movement and the line. FOOTNOTES David R. Olson in
The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive
Implications of Writing and Reading: “among
our most valued skills is our ability to make use
of written texts, namely, our literacy. The primary
function of the school is to impart what are called
‘basic skills,’ reading, writing and arithmetic, all of
which involve competence with systems of notation.
Public expenditure on education is rivaled only by
defense and health and a major portion of children’s
formative years are spent in acquiring, first, some
general literate competence and second, in using
this competence to acquire such specialized bodies
of knowledge as science and history”
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 1). In this regard, we
shouldn’t forget Marcel Mauss’s seminal
“Techniques du corps.” Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Viking,
1979), p. 152. The manual Foucault cites is
Conduite des écoles
chrétiennes by J.-B. de la Salle (B.N.
Ms. 11759, 248-9): Pupils must “hold their
bodies erect, somewhat turned and free on the left
side, slightly inclined, so that, with the elbow
placed on the table, the chin can be rested upon
the hand, unless this were to interfere with the
view; the left leg must be somewhat more forward
under the table than the right. A distance of two
fingers must be left between the body and the
table; for not only does one write with more
alertness, but nothing is more harmful to the
health than to acquire the habit of pressing one’s
stomach against the table; the part of the left arm
from the elbow to the hand must be placed on the
table&,”and so on (La Salle,
63-4). Literacy studies in
anthropology is a huge field. The seminal study is
Jack Goody’s The Domestication of the
Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977),
but see also Walter Ong’s Orality and
Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Methuen, 1982) and the more specialized
essays in D. R. Olson, N. Torrance, and A.
Hildyard, eds., Literacy, Language, and
Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading
and Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1985). See Serge Netchine,
“Espace de lecture et lecture de l’espace chez l’enfant”
and Guy Denhière, “La lecture et la
psychologie cognitive: quelques points de
répère” in Espaces de la
Lecture, ed. Anne-Marie Christin (Paris: Centre
Georges Pompidou, 1988). McLane, Joan Brooks
and Gillian Dowley McNamee, Early Literacy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990). See also Bruno
Duborgel, Imaginaire et pédagogie
(Toulouse: Privat, 1992) and Serge Tisseron, “All
Writing is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the
Manuscript” in Yale French Studies,
vol. 0, issue 84, Boundaries: Writing and Drawing
(1994). As Melanie Klein
notes in “Le rôle de l’école
dans le développement libidinal de l’enfant,”
[The Role of School in the Libidinal
Development of the Child], children learning to
read and write invest letters with barely bridled
kinetic and libidinal energies (Essais de
psychanalyse, intro. by Ernst Jones, trans.
Marguerite Derrida, preface by Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok [Paris: Payot, 1967]). These
energies are subdued and channeled, the body is
stilled, and letters become standardized and assume
their “correct” horizontal positions,
as the child learns to write properly. Creating
legible characters of a language has a good deal to
do with stilling the libidinal energies and
dramatic movements out of which representation, of
any kind, is generated in the first
place. Stephanie
Strickland, “Moving Through Me as I Move: A
Paradigm for Interaction,” http://califia.hispeed.com/Strickland/ Paul de Man, “Phenomenality
and Materiality in Kant” in Aesthetic
Ideology (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1996). It
would take me too far afield at the moment to
explore de Man’s theory of the materiality of
the letter with respect to animated poetic works,
but it is something I hope to attempt in the
future. Director animations
are capable of producing 30-50 frames per second,
whereas the usual quantity for Flash animations is
12 frames per second. Obviously, a program that
provides more visual information within a brief
interval is able to reproduce movement more
accurately and convincingly. Jim Andrews, “Nio
and the Art of Interactive Audio for the
Web”
(see interview with Andrews in dichtung-digital.org
1/2002).
The
author-programmer’s website contains
biographical information (we learn that he/she is
French and born in 1971), and even allows you to
get in touch with him/her via e-mail, but no name
is provided. “Servovalve.org” is
described as a “chrono-illogical accumulation
of sonographic pieces, a search for another way of
staring at a screen.” My gratitude to Jim
Andrews for providing Servovalve’s “real”
name. See For an approach to
the visual as a “language” of signs,
see Louis Marin, Etudes sémiologiques
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1972). It should also be noted
that Servovalve also employs an audio track during
large portions of “nurb.” The track is
composed mainly of mechanical noises, swooshing
sounds, or barely melodic riffs that sound as if
they had been produced electronically on a
synthesizer. For an account of Servovalve’s
use of music, I refer my reader to Jim Andrews’s
interview
with the web artist. See
Discours/figure (Paris: Klinksieck, 1985),
especially the section entitled “La Ligne et
la lettre” (211-212). |
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