What's Next for Text:
9. Animating Writing
When you put writing back into time and space you have animated it, and animation is proving to be the central expressive power of computer graphics. Not surprisingly, letters have begun to dance on the screen. But, like shape poetry, animated letters have been around for a long time. Consider a sample from an alphabet developed at Bergamo in the late fourteenth century by Giovanni dei Grassi.
The letter forms strive to hold in the life trying to burst out of their alphabetical boundaries. Chivalric human figures intricate themselves with animal life, all of them writhing with motion. Again we see symbolic notation and the world of life, of physical body, sharing the same notational space. Typographical life struggles with flesh and blood. First we read the letters as printouts from an animation, and then, and with a little difficulty, as letters.
We see the same choreographic power at a higher level of magnification in an “R” from an early twentieth-century French “Circus” alphabet.
The contorted bodies which form the upper and lower elements of the letter seem imprisoned by the letter form and struggling against its confines. The physical world of kinesthetic movement struggles with the fixed world of print. A different frequency of oscillation between the two worlds can be seen in the “C” from a seventeenth-century French alphabet.
The letter form floats above the ceremonial scene behind it as if mounted on a transparent glass surface. We see the alphabetic surface when we look at the letter and the world of 3D physical reality when we look through it.
The dance these letters have wanted to dance all along is now danced in TV commercials. Let me show you one such, for a Scottish nonalcoholic ale.
This 40-second moral fable tells us about the letter “A” (Adam? Alcohol? Ale?) who has learned how to walk a straight line home from the pub by drinking non-alcoholic ale. Adam-A gets up out of a letter-bed and goes on his perilous way through a scaled-up letter landscape. As he makes his way along, either the letters have grown into buildings or we have shrunk into ants. When finally the can is popped open, out foams another visual pun, an ale composed of 1% signs that tell us about the 1% alcohol stuff that is foaming. Alphabetic text becomes ale foam. Play it again and follow the narrative logic.
Surely this is what Cangiullo, what all the animated alphabets, would have done if they could. Motion, and emotion, suppressed and contorted for a couple of millennia, have suddenly found a release.
Why animate letters? Why force the alphabet into a series of graphic puns with the body? Again, to heal the breach between ordinary human kinesthetic motion and the abstract motions of conceptual thought, between dance and philosophy. Western notation has grown more and more remote from the felt realities of the world we evolved in, culminating in the symbolic logic notation pioneered by Boole and Frege in the nineteenth century. The digital expressive space moves back in the opposite direction, toward a more energetic oscillation between conceptual thought and behavior. Homer was doing the same thing when, instead of talking about “courage,” he put Achilles into action and when, wanting to describe Odysseus’s craftiness and guile, he used a phrase which meant both “well-travelled” and “a man of many turnings.” His imagination worked, like that of a modern computer graphics artist, in a world of actions rather than abstract thoughts. The fast cutting now so common in film and TV tries to do the same thing, to “think” through a hundred images of “Achilles” rather than by saying “Courage” or “Anger” caused X or Y. We may object to this distracting technique, think image is slaying word, but we cannot say it represents an abandonment of Western literary values. It returns to them.