What's
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7. The Third Dimension
In digital expression, text not only moves, it often moves in three-dimensional space. Again, we’ve had warnings about what was coming. The last century abounded in visual exhortation to consider letters as images rather than alphabetic code, to look at them rather than through them. The Futurist painter Giacomo Balla took a series of numbers and broke the 2D print convention by extruding them into 3D space.
This kind of extrusion now forms part of the standard repertoire of a computer graphics type designer. Text can move into 3D space almost at will, just as the Futurist painters wanted it to.
Another Futurist artist, Francesco Cangiullo, in a complex pun, animated letters into students climbing the steps of the Faculty of Letters, the stairs becoming the classical stairs of learning, the gradus ad Parnassum.
The letters, now stick-figure students, struggle up the the steep steps of learning, and the “studenti in lettere” written on the back panels repeats in words the visual pun: the students have been put inside the physical letter forms, and well as being depicted as students who study the arts and letters.
The Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg took the letters and numbers of a flat calendar and inflated the hard-edged 2D symbols into fat squishy inner tubes.
The installation artist Jenny Holzer bent a dynamic alphabetic around the spiral curves of the Guggenheim Museum so that we read the letters as writing and as spatial design in equal parts.
There have been many other flotations of letters into the foreground and into 3D space. Whatever other aesthetic or political purposes such designs had in mind, they shared a central didacticism: Pay attention to letters as three-dimensional figures, as material objects. An experimental field called “dimensional typography” has been doing precisely this. Here are two examples. The first is an ABC from a font called Univers Revolved, by Ji Byol Lee, created in 1996. It takes as its inspiration a well-known font, the 1957 Univers font designed by Adrian Frutiger, and injects it into three-dimensional space.
You can hardly recognize the letters. A text printed in them would be hard to read. No increase in perceptual efficiency here. Why then such an endeavor? It comes from a desire to put letters back into the 3D space where we all live and breathe and have our being. We want to think of a letter as a physical object, a piece of stuff, which we can pick up in our hands and rotate on an axis, as we do with objects in the ordinary world. We want to put letters back into the world of stuff, but we still want them to be letters.
Here’s another example of “dimensional typography.”
Ligature, designed by Bart Overly in 1995, welds the traditional specimen letters “A” and “B” into a single 3D form, one which yields alternate readings—first “A” then “B” then “A” again—as you turn it around in your mind. Again, a visual pun. Such a jeu d’esprit exudes maximal alphabetic self-consciousness but at a high level of granularity, the individual letter form. It reveals a yearning for 3D space, and for compression of meaning which merges letters as symbols and letters as objects.
Such letter-scale self-consciousness has formed a part of our common expressive universe ever since the computer graphics labs started making TV commercials. Letters in broadcast TV commercials want to be three-dimensional like Oldenburg’s puffy integers and to move around on the page like the Marinetti typographical explosions discussed in Chapter 2. They often seem like buildings which we fly around. Then we see that we’ve zoomed up preternaturally close to the letters, changed scale drastically, as we do with one of James Rosenquist’s gigantic paintings when we look at it up close. The letter space has become a three-dimensional cityscape.
Here is an early dynamic logo for WCBS-TV New York which illustrates this movement. In the movement which computer graphics has now made commonplace, we zoom into the text and then fly around it. Electronic text of this sort answers a question which simply cannot arise in conventional printed text. What does the other side of a letter look like? After we see it from the front we start our circumnavigation. Next we are halfway around the letters, which now hang in three-dimensional space. Then we are on the back side of the text, an area which, in print, is as invisible as the back side of the moon.
Once after I showed this segment to a group of academics, a fellow came up to me and introduced himself as a professor of accounting. He said I had illustrated his fundamental principle in teaching accounting: “Always ask what’s behind the numbers!” Three-dimensional dynamic text can, in fact, literalize many of the metaphors we use to describe what happens in a flat printed text. Not only do we strive to see “what’s behind” an argument, but what's “at the bottom” of it, where its “center” is, where you can “get your bearings” in it or “clarify your position on this issue,” or “take a stand,” or “draw back from a conclusion,” because we yearn to use the orienting powers our species evolved to deal with the 3D world. These venerable metaphors betray an unsatisfied hunger for spatial orientation in conceptual notation and thought. They suggest that a dynamic imagination has stood behind fixed text from the beginning.