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The following posts have been extracted from John Cayley and Dmitri Lemmerman's 2006 article Lens: The Practice and Poetics of Writing in Immersive VR: A Case Study with Maquette.

1. APA: Cayley, J., Lemmerman, D., (2006). Lens: The Practice and Poetics of Writing in Immersive VR (A Case Study with Maquette). LEA, 14(05-06).
2. Chicago: John Cayley, John, and Dmitri Lemmerman., "Lens: The Practice and Poetics of Writing in Immersive VR (A Case Study with Maquette)." LEA 14, no. 05-06 (2006).

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What is, what will be, the phenomenology and aesthetics of text in 3-D space?

‘Is there a phenomenology of text in space?’ I would answer that there is, but that it is, as it were, constrained. Specifically, in the case of text as writing, it is constrained to surfaces. Text, in this form — as perceptual material object, as a composition of printed or inscribed letters — is two-dimensional. It has no appreciable thickness, and rests, third-dimensionless, on a surface whose thickness is, itself, largely non-signifying. It is often desirable that the actual surface of writing be as thin as possible. Of course there are exceptional cases, where we become aware, for example, of a force producing real depth in a surface that bears a carved or incised piece of lettering, or when the mark-making ‘ink’ is ‘thick,’ literally, as well as figuratively.

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There are also a wide variety of exceptional cases arising from practices of Concrete poetry and poetics, to which we will return. However, typically text is a matter for surfaces. In so far as it dwells in space, it dwells on surfaces. Usually this is an opaque and resistant surface, through which other physical objects, including ourselves, cannot pass; not, at least, without damaging or destroying the writing. Of course, surfaces that bear writing do themselves have locations in real space. They are, typically, portable and often gathered into piles or collections of paper leaves. In the West, traditionally, the codex book is where writing most often dwells.

In the World of Letters, writing in real space occurs on signs, on monumental inscriptions, and on objects that require labels, chiefly containers or vehicles. These are all special surfaces which are very much site and context specific, set up to function in an exact and particular manner — to inform, warn, attract custom and attention; to celebrate, memorialize, identify, and so on. Note that only rarely is the text displayed on surfaces in space anything other than functional; such text requires to be inscribed and read out of necessity rather than rhetorical desire.

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Constraints on the spatial manifestation of written text has a further implication relating to the characteristics of writing as graphic form. Because writing is typically located either on portable surfaces or on surfaces that are intended to be read in very specific contexts and for very specific purposes, we have a very clear idea of its graphic constituents’ — that is, its letters’ — size. Letters must always be a good size for reading, big enough to allow us to distinguish the differences which constitute symbolic structure, small enough to copy-fit a significant gobbet of text in the available surface area. Letter forms are, in the Structuralist’s sense, arbitrary. To support the differences they establish, they must be relatively complex shapes, and yet they must become familiar, in the culture where they are current, especially to literate viewers, for whom their very differentiated complexities enable reading. Graphically, and in terms of phenomenology, this gives us — culturally, experientially — a vocabulary of graphic forms about whose size we have very specific ideas and expectations.

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Screens are a particular case of writing surface and, manifestly, they are shifting our experience of written language, although more slowly than might have been expected. In the early days of personal and networked computing, screens carried text, but did so in a manner that ran counter to the highly developed aesthetics of print and literary culture. Moreover, this occurred at the same time that screens were establishing themselves, in the form of television, as the visual business end of receivers for broadcast representations of distant real-world spaces. To do so it employs conventional, illusionistic spatial representations, generated by and adapted from lens optics, photography and film. Today, when we use a computer screen, not only do we expect it to be capable of these visual representations, so familiar from film and television, we also demand a fair degree of spatial representation in our software tools, even when all we are doing is, for example, typing.

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Even the flat (third-dimensionless) screen of the programmaton, because of its increasingly implicated relations with film and television, invites our engagement with the illusionistic, naturalistic representation of space, and this continues to have implications for any aestheticized presentation of text on the screen, on the making, that is, of screen-based literal art. To be more specific, it has implied another and, for some readers, a promisingly ‘new’ relationship with the phenomenology of text in space, all without directly addressing the issues and problems as such.

I would argue that the effect on literal art and poetics in new media — the effect of this failure to address directly the phenomenology of text and the ambiguities of the display media — has been to push literal art in the direction of a Concrete poetics. By Concrete, I mean a poetics in which written language — letters and words — take on characteristics of other kinds of objects in order to generate rhetorical and aesthetic affect and significance.

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I wanted my letters in space always to face the primary tracked point of view. If the tracked reader is positioned at the edge of a plane of letters and she turns to face the plane edge-on, the letters turn to face her. Their images overlap, occlude one another — partially or wholly — and recede in view since the majority of them will be successively more or less distant. ‘Normally’ the surfaces of the larger closer letters would cover the more distant smaller letters. However, because of the ‘bug,’ smaller letter outlines are clearly discernible within but ‘over’ the forms of the nearer letters.

Given these circumstances, and because, I believe, all the letter forms are familiar — both visually and symbolically legible — and because we know what their relative scale ‘should be,’ this produces a striking and somewhat bizarre visual illusion.

We assume that even though the smaller letters are rendered ‘over’ the larger ones, they must be more distant. Thus, what we see is a very deep and narrow corridor formed from letter shapes, with the most distant smallest letters visible in completely edged outline, apparently farthest off, as if inscribed on a tall, thin distant end ‘wall’ of the corridor. Moreover, the reader is able to move ‘into’ the corridor formed by this plane of letter shapes.

This powerful perceptual experience is demonstrable and repeatable, despite its artificiality and strangeness. The question arises, why should this phenomenon be so immediate and effective? As we asked above, why doesn’t the linguistic materiality of the graphic forms and structures run counter to their visuality, counter to whatever illusion of space may or may not be generated? At this point I began to formulate a hypothesis: literal forms are highly effective for delineating space in immersive virtual environments.

I believe that there are a number of quite common sense related reasons for this. Letter forms are relatively complex and the differences instantiated in this complexity are necessarily and systematically significant. Letter forms are both complex and arbitrary but they are also familiar and rational seeming. They are instantly recognizable and encountered with remarkable, perhaps unique, frequency by any subject in a culture where the set of script forms in question is current, particularly, of course, by subjects who use these forms to read and write.

Moreover we have a very well entrenched set of expectations in relation to the relative size of these arbitrary graphic shapes. If we believe them to be on the same plane, we expect literal elements all to be of a similar or commensurate size (equal constituents of the same text) or, if they are of different sizes, we expect there to be a paratextual reason for this (because, for example, the letters are part of an emphasized word or a title). If we see words or letters which are larger than the letters surrounding them and there is no paratextual reason for this, we are likely to think that these letters are closer to us than any surrounding smaller letters.

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If these effects are conceded, it follows that literal materiality can have powerful influence on the shaping of immersive 3-D space and the structures within it. What I take to be happening is that the pre-existing, enculturated phenomenology of textuality, when disposed in this illusory space, struggles to maintain its real-world phenomenology, with and against the graphic world’s programmed structures. A relationship of mutual interference and influence develops in which the phenomenology of text shapes the reader’s experience of space while, at the same time, of course, spatiality works to alter our phenomenological experience of text in its new, artificial environment.