What's Next for Text:
8. Satisfying Ancient Hungers
Let me illustrate one of these ancient hungers, the desire that word and thing become one, that the abstract symbol and the physical object it describes present the same image. Here’s a sequence which does this by creating a visual pun of a “table.”
The letters are first extruded into 3D space, then metamorphose, as a flower and vase is created on top of them, into a conventional flower and fruit still life in which the word table has become the thing table. We read the letters both as abstract alphabetical notation and as stuff. A major strand of Western philosophy, the debate between between things and the words we use to name them, has been rolled up into a clever and lighthearted pun. Again, two kinds of expression, alphabet and image, form the same letters into a visual pun. We can see here alphabetic expression yearning to recapture the imagistic notations which preceded it.
When text floats in a three-dimensional space, new ways to indicate levels of specificity open out. Consider this experimental effort to spatialize an annual report.
Again, consider the efficiencies that such a notation creates. We can choose the level of specificity we wish to encounter in the text. And the relationship between the various levels of statement takes on genuine spatial character. The “levels” in the document becomes just that, spatial levels among which one can move.
We can see this spatiality working in a more complex way in the following job application, submitted as an exercise in a design class in UCLA Extension. It is not possible to demonstrate all of its interactivity here but let me describe some of it and provide a brief recorded sample. The reader is offered a set of symbols; eye, brain, hand. When he selects one by putting it in the central circle, a series of headings materialize, floating in space. Choose one, and a text appears. Thus when you choose the eye, and then “Poker (not solitaire)” the following text appears: “I’m looking for a strong team.” When you bring the brain icon into the magic circle, and choose “Damned lies and Design,” you bring into focus the following text: “I know how to be true to my medium.”
And so he does. The way the job application is presented proves that the applicant knows both what kind of job he seeks and that he can do it when he finds it. Text, in such a spatial presentation, is not devalued. It becomes the object of a search, the goal of a spatial adventure.