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If you were to ask, in a metaphorical way, what talent
you need to deal with complex printed texts, you might do worse than say
that you need to cultivate a sense of “where you are” in an
argument or a story. In digital expression that metaphor becomes literalized.
The central literate talent in electronic space is the pilot’s gift
for “positional awareness.” In the print world, both print
and the reader’s distance from it are fixed. In digital space, both
come into play as you fly over the informational landscape. We move in
simulacra of such sign fields every day, of course. Ever since the poster
first entered Paris’s cityscape in the nineteenth century, we have
navigated a 3D city of layered words. Las Vegas at night must represent
the climax of this development. The Pop artists in the sixties pointed
out this new landscape of words and signs, and stressed its three-dimensionality.
James Rosenquist’s huge billboard-sized canvases before which we
stand, art-gallery-wise, close-up, as if we had flown through the air
from the street to the billboard soaring overhead. He imagined a beholder
who flew through a 3D expressive field as you do in a computer graphic
landscape. Claes Oldenburg’s overstuffed numbers seat us in the
same position, suddenly, through magical scale-change, able to shrink
and walk among them as equals.
Simulation of aircraft flight was an early computer graphics
triumph, thanks to Defense Department backing. But the expressive machinery
seemed to have a natural talent for such simulations anyway. The characteristic
motion of a low-flying aircraft has become the standard path into three-dimensional
textual space, analogous to the left-to-right, down one line, motion of
the eye reading a fixed text. And the position of the pilot becomes the
generic posture for all of us, flying over complex informational typography
at great speed and having, somehow, to take it all in. The cockpit of
a jet fighter has served, in fact, as an experimental laboratory for new
techniques in “speed reading” an informational landscape.
“Heads-up” displays superimpose alphanumeric information on
the cockpit windshield in an exact embodiment of the oscillation between
looking at an inscriptional surface and looking through
it which we experience as we move from stuff to attitude about it and
back. A host of other electronic displays make available to the pilot
compressed information that must be absorbed and acted upon immediately.
Not a bad image for how we all feel about the information pouring at us
from all sides in the “information economy.”
The uninterrupted linear text you are reading right now
evolved to maximize a scarce resource: the expressive substrate. Papyrus
and parchment cost a lot. Two hundred and fifty calves donated their skins
to make a big church Bible like the Winchester Bible. Even paper, while
it was still made by hand, was expensive. Writing by hand on any of these
surfaces was laborious and time-consuming. As white space became cheaper,
designers arranged type on the page’s two dimensions so that our
visual cortex could correlate abstract subdivisions of matter with physical
subdivisions of space. What more logical extension of conventional layout
than to step into three dimensions when, as now, we can do it?
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