“The Materiality of the Typographic Signifier”
“The experimental typography which proliferated in the early decades of the twentieth century,” writes Johanna Drucker, “was as much a theoretical practice as were the manifestos, treatises and critical texts it was often used to produce.” (Drucker 1994, 9) Drucker’s book 'The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923,' while restricted to a defined historical period, offers a model for the “materiality” of visual-linguistic signs that looks forward through what she calls the “nearly proto-electronic and cybernetic” sensibility of F. T. Marinetti (ibid, 109) - its kinetic adumbration of a “dematerialized,” “wireless,” or “electronic” medium. (ibid, 138) Drucker engages in a purposefully heterogeneous discourse for visible language that hints at contemporary implications for what Richard Lanham has called “the complete renegotiation of the alphabet/icon ratio” inherent in desktop publishing (Lanham 1993, 34) - and that extends itself to the same questions of subjectivity that are problematized by virtual reality. Insofar as it brings “visual presence” to meet “literary absence,” this notion of materiality is supported by a “hybrid theoretical model which contains certain internal and irresolvable contradictions.” (Drucker 1994, 43)
The typographically rendered page is an image, and it is also language; the reader is also a voyeur, viewer, or “screener.” Representation is at once in and of. These simultaneities operate within the production of both visual pattern and semantics; both are integral to signification, and both inform Drucker’s “materiality of interpretation.” It is a potent model for a digital visual poetics, whose object is never merely “text” even in the most generous poststructuralist sense—and especially when the “text” is a representation of three-dimensional typographical objects in the “quadri-dimensional” hermeneutic space of an electronic visual simulation.
“The experimental typography which proliferated in the early decades of the twentieth century,” writes Johanna Drucker, “was as much a theoretical practice as were the manifestos, treatises and critical texts it was often used to produce.” (Drucker 1994, 9) Drucker’s book 'The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923,' while restricted to a defined historical period, offers a model for the “materiality” of visual-linguistic signs that looks forward through what she calls the “nearly proto-electronic and cybernetic” sensibility of F. T. Marinetti (ibid, 109) - its kinetic adumbration of a “dematerialized,” “wireless,” or “electronic” medium. (ibid, 138) Drucker engages in a purposefully heterogeneous discourse for visible language that hints at contemporary implications for what Richard Lanham has called “the complete renegotiation of the alphabet/icon ratio” inherent in desktop publishing (Lanham 1993, 34) - and that extends itself to the same questions of subjectivity that are problematized by virtual reality. Insofar as it brings “visual presence” to meet “literary absence,” this notion of materiality is supported by a “hybrid theoretical model which contains certain internal and irresolvable contradictions.” (Drucker 1994, 43)
The typographically rendered page is an image, and it is also language; the reader is also a voyeur, viewer, or “screener.” Representation is at once in and of. These simultaneities operate within the production of both visual pattern and semantics; both are integral to signification, and both inform Drucker’s “materiality of interpretation.” It is a potent model for a digital visual poetics, whose object is never merely “text” even in the most generous poststructuralist sense—and especially when the “text” is a representation of three-dimensional typographical objects in the “quadri-dimensional” hermeneutic space of an electronic visual simulation.
