East Side images and quotes

Nietzsche quote slide

This Red Herring post is about the images used in the Stance section of the presentation. I have strong views on PowerPoint, and prefer to use mainly images with a few words and diagrams.

Nietzsche was fond of his schreibkugel. The Friedrich Nietzsche quote is taken from Friedrich Kittler’s book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Standford University Press, 1999, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. The book deals with these three technologies that put a mechanical layer between ourselves and the performance or text, and that allowed reproduction of performances. Just one irony: before the gramophone became a mass technology, many households had a piano. Young ladies were encouraged to take lessons and to play light music in the home – and not just in richer families. As Kittler documents, this pool of young women trained to use all their fingers enabled the rapid adoption of writing machines. The gramophone began to replace the piano in the next generation. As Seb Schmoller has pointed out in a nice diagram, we are at the very beginning of another technological change, and similar ironies can be expected.

symbols and words

The last ten years has seen a significant increase in knowledge in how the brain learns to read. These developments are summarised in popular and accessible form in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, published by Icon Books in the UK. Pages 145 to 154 explain the processes and circuits used when we fixate on a word between saccades (around 250 milliseconds). The small image of a cave painting in the Bhimbetka rock shelters was taken by Sarbanidas Roy. The ‘tag’ image is my own.

Our new writing tools - Nokia phone

Our new writing tools. I rendered the outside of the poster as a greyscale to underline the way some people find the online world more engaging than “R.L.” (‘real life’). As one of Sherry Turkle’s students put it some years ago, “RL is just one more window, and it’s usually not my best one“.

cultural blackspot - artist poster East Side building site fence - Digbeth iBaby - artist poster - East Side building site fence Digbeth

East Side in Digbeth is undergoing significant development at present. These two artist posters appeared on a building fence site. The iBaby image is very simple: it is a scan of an old doll. When you scan a three dimensional image, only the parts of the object in contact with the scanner bed will be in sharp focus, there will be a very fast loss of focus and illumination as you move away from the scanner bed.

Tags: ,

Comments are closed.