Alternumerics and the 1 to 1 ratio

Paul Chan in his introduction to his Alternumerics makes some hefty claims:

“Alternumerics explores the intimate relationship between language and interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we type and we what mean [sic]. By replacing the individual letters and numbers with textual and graphic fragments that connect and signify what is typed in radically different ways, “Alteranumerics” transforms the act of typing into a digital performance and any computer connected to a standard printer, into an interactive art making installation.”

To say that he his project has transformed the act of typing into a performance is assuming that the act of typing isn’t already a performance. Notice he doesn’t say, “transforms the act of typing from ______ to a performance. The question of what is being transformed is never addressed only assumed not to be a performance. However, the act of typing is very much an act. It is a simple act, and one that is overlooked easily, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a performance, a creation of some sort. While Chan’s graphic fonts more fully reveal the “fissure” or signification processes that we experience when we type, that does not mean the new fonts created that fissure. It’s always been there, it’s just not very apparent because we are so used to it (I feel like this is a phenomenological problem, but I’m definitely not smart enough to figure it out).

This leads to other issues. The fonts Chan created aren’t so much fonts as they are a simple code, a one to one ratio. “A” is represented by a certain type of squiggly line, “B” is a different squiggly line. When you read writing typed in this Squiggly font, you can read it if you internalize the cipher, the same way people can read computer code, or read phase space diagrams. Reading this is even simpler than learning a new language since the grammatical structures don’t change. (It reminded me a lot like reading A Clockwork Orange.) The next logical step might be that all fonts are code. That doesn’t mean that all language is code, necessarily, but fonts, maybe. Fonts after all are all graphic depictions of alphanumerics, and Zaph Dingbats or Wingdings does the same thing that Chan is doing with his graphic fonts.

The House as a Horror Story

Mary Flanagan’s The House is a horror story, a physical and psychological haunted house in the vein of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The horror of the piece is derived from its alogical spatiality, its non-directionality floating architecture, which forces a sort of agoraphobia onto the reader. The shrinking and enlarging of the boxes provides the semblance of movement and therefore control of one’s surroundings, while simultaneously remaining elusive, tangential, to the reader’s control, and mocking of the logic of human movement. The mocking of the human perception of space is a very Dadaist trait in terms of self-negation. The stripped down architectural elements both reflect the essence of structure (the literal building blocks of architecture) but are simultaneously subverted by their own ungroundedness and maneuverability. The reader’s body is denied placement and control, although given the illusion of both.

This is similar to House of Leaves, which gives the illusion of walls, doors, and staircases but stretches their representations to the point of the infinite, thereby negating their meaning altogether. The point of a door is to lead to somewhere else, but in infinite space, one point is the same as the last. The boxes of Flannigan’s piece are obvious constructions, which sets them apart from the surrounding grey space. However, because the grey space is infinite (at least from my perception) the structure is negated, as its placement in space can never be found.

In this way Flanigan’s piece reflects Kandisky’s description of clowns:

“‘Clowns in particular, build their composition on a very definite alogicality. Their action has no definite development, their movements are incongruous, their efforts lead nowhere and indeed, they’re not meant to.’ Lack of motivation and of clear direction: these elements contributed to a ‘depthlessness’ and play which disputed the absent authority of the ‘paternal’ text” (Nichols 236).

Flanagan’s piece the grammar of the text is removed, once again giving the semblance of language but without its supporting structures. The text can be read backward and forward, upside-down and from behind, negating the spatial structure on which we depend to derive meaning from the language.

The negation of that spatial language structure is once again reflecting the Dada negation of itself, leaving “absolute irony as the only valid mode of self-consciousness” (Nichols 232). The House is aware of its own horror, its own arbitrariness, and its spatial existence is an anathema to human spatial existence. That is the point. The text is ostensibly about human relationships, as described by the author, and human relationships, are, indeed, horror stories.

The Death and Rebirth of Time and Space

“Time and Space died yesterday.” Marinetti’s eighth postulate in his Manifesto. Not exactly true, or if it was true at the time, it is no longer true. For futurists, Time is dead because “We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” And that was written in a time when mail was a letter, not a binary coding. The speed we have witnessed and experienced since Marinetti wrote this manifesto is exponentially more than what they had experienced. However, our great speed, and the conquering of outer space (kinda), has revealed that the speed of our “life” is far from “absolute.” The material limits we have discovered have reigned in the infinity perspective that the futurists seem to revel in. Even while digital poetics has opened up new experiences of immediate time and space (works can be viewed simultaneously from anywhere at anytime), the field has become very aware of its own limitations. A new quantum technology is being put into iPods because there just isn’t the space to add anymore parts that aren’t on the atomic scale. Digital artists know operate in the limits of what a program can do, even if they don’t know all it can do. Alan Sondheim’s programming poetry is taking programs and pushing them to their limits to see what happens. But he always finds a limit.

It is interesting that the futurists were invested in such boldly material typography but still thought the “absolute” was essential. Apollinaire, I gathered from the reading, thought the same thing. There seemed to be a real cognitive dissonance with the futurists, where they tried to force a perception of the world without fully investing themselves in the consequences. Their wanting to “destroy…feminism” is their retaliation against being “human”, a title that men claimed in the previous centuries. Essentially, they are saying men are now machines, and women are now human. Our proof is that we say so. Shucking the material of the person, they turn to the material of the letter and got nuts with it. Maybe in this sense, women are the writings of men, a proposition with which I just bet Kelly will have a problem.

Walter Benn Michaels, You Are Not the Boss of Me

In The Shape of the Signifier Walter Benn Michaels structures his arguments in terms of very imperialistic dichotomies where “if you think the intention of the author is what counts, then you don’t think the subject position of the readers matter, but if you don’t think the intention of the author is what counts, then the subject position of the reader will be the only thing that matters” (11). (I will assume this is his argument, although I can’t quite tell. He just calls it “the” argument.)

A note to all scholars, you can’t tell me what I do and don’t think. My ability for cognitive dissidence holds no bounds, so if I want to believe in both the intention of the author and the subject position I will, goddammnit.

While WBM’s logical progression to make this divisive statement appears sound enough, it also doesn’t seem to allow for a grey space, a space (under which I was impressed to believe) is where everything lies. McGann calls a poem an experience that has movement and temporal elements associated with it. The movement can fall into the virtual space between author intention and subject position, where all sorts of incomplete canoodling occurs. (This is the space occupied by the cyborg, an entity that takes in dichotomies without hierarchizing either polarity and mixes them into a nice goulash of incomplete shiftiness [not a direct quote].)

A grey space that might cause problems in WBM’s theory is Jörg Piringer’s Soundpoems. Not only is his website entirely grey, Piringer’s sound projects are extremely simple, theoretically complicated, and insanely fun. I want to focus on Soundpoem 1, which operate a little differently than 3-6, although all share similar principles.

Piringer’s SP1 and SP2 function as software for the creation of sound poems. And while it may seem that it looks like software from 1993 with limited permutations (compared to GarageBand, SoundBooth, or Audacity), there is deceptive depth to what can be created from such basic elements. In SP1 an operator can place nine buttons in four squares to make combinations of sounds. However, there is no limit to how many buttons can be placed in the squares, which means opens up exponentially more permutations (not infinite, I don’t think, because the beats loop). The authorial intention here is based in the material limitations of what we are given. There are an infinite number of sounds that could be used to create a sound poem; we are given eight and a pause. I think it is hard to ignore such limiting boundaries that Piringer has placed on the subject. However, the subject-position cannot create anything without Piringer providing the software. Whatever poems we create, however diverse and divorced from Piringer’s intention, are all limited by his construction.

If the “only thing that matters” is either the author-intention or the subject position, nothing will be created in SP1. The program/poem does not create sound on its own, but without the program/poem the subject cannot create a poem either.