What's Next for Text:
2. Fixed in Time
“Fixed in time.” Let’s begin our examination of digital
expression by unfixing it. Here are two student exercises submitted in
a class at Carnegie-Mellon University’s School of Design. The first
fulfills the venerable composition class assignment: Describe the most
exciting thing that happened to you last summer.
Elevator: click to see animation
What is happening here? For one thing, the linearity of print is discarded. In a printed text, words come a line at a time, left to right and then down one. You can skip around a little if you must, but the order of presentation does not. You are not aware of the order of presentation at all. It is part of “reading” and completely transparent. All you attention goes to the meaning of the text. Here the text moves, and the eye is always attracted to movement. The movement constructs a moving picture of an elevator in operation, doors opening and shutting, an elevator getting stuck and vibrating a little on its cables as they so disconcertingly do at such times, an elevator again enduring its customary ups and downs.
When you look at images, still or moving, you apprehend them not element by element, as you read words, but all at once, as a single entity. So two time scales operate here: sequential for the alphabetic text, instantaneous for the elevator movie. Our apprehension of the text oscillates between image and writing, first the one then the other. The result is a short short story built on a pun. A pun is a word or phrase which carries simultaneously two separate and often opposite meanings. Here the story is carried by both the image and the words. The image is not an illustration in the margin of the alphabetic text, but part of it. Two kinds of apprehension are multiplexed together.
Would it be stretching things to call the moving text, the “kinetic text” as it has come to be called, more efficient? Or might it, at least, model how a greater compression of meaning, a greater efficiency, might be constructed? Two ways of telling a story reinforce one another. Classical rhetoric had a special term for efforts at such compression: it was ecphrasis. An ecphrasis was a “speaking picture,” a descriptive passage so immediately suggestive of visual imagery that it seemed to yoke together the power of words and images. Here such a yoking literally takes place. When I show this short short story to live audiences, they always laugh. Their laughter applauds the clever artistic balance between image and word, the pleasure conveyed by condensed yet immediately available information. No decoding needed.
Linear prose notation can say only one thing at a time. The history of literature, considered in one way, is a long struggle to overcome this limitation. On a small scale, the pun represents such a two-for-one meaning; on a larger scale, literary figures like irony work the same way, manage to say both X and non-X in the same words at the same time. If you cannot say everything at once, you can at least say two things at once. Such figures, though to my knowledge no one has ever thought to construe them in this way, strive for greater productivity. When writing moves from the printing house to the computer graphics lab, kinetic typography can be used for the same purpose.
What happens, in such an expressive field, to the workaday distinction between prose (writing which goes to the end of the right margin) and poetry (writing which doesn’t)? It collapses. Neither category fits. Instead, a notation emerges which tries to stretch across the gulf between the abstract notational space of conventional print and the animated life of movement and gesture which characterizes the everyday world we live in. Poetry tries to do this, too, and so we must call it poetry. An efficient compression operates here too. Stimulus and response are, pun-like, made part of the same utterance. Writer and reader become part of the same perceptual sensibility. The piece is a process, and processes don’t stay still, fixed in time. They move.
Now let’s look at another example of kinetic text from the same Carnegie Mellon design class:
Cancer Report: click to see animation
Here we have a dialogue rather than a short story. The neutral clinical language has not changed—it is still a medical report—but the reader’s response to the report has been superimposed on the text. The distant abstraction of the medical report has been fused with its human consequences, with the cluster of deep feelings with which it has been read. The time scale of reading has been slowed down. We must ponder the weight and import of each word detached, for a moment, from its neighboring words. (You can see how vital the slow pace is when the report is displayed on a faster computer than it was designed for: the power starts to leach out of it.) Such a digital display fuses the text itself with the experience of reading it.