It is my feeling that interface design theorists will increasingly follow this same path. The user of an interface is not a generic entity. Experience, aptitude, age, gender, operating system, culture, sensibility, interests, moods...the list of potential factors which could influence or bias response to an interface are huge. To isolate any one variable in a quantifiable valid experimental protocol ultimately involves stripping an interface down to an extremely simplistic representation. This reduction risks eradicating the living quality of an artwork. The reader may be faced with a situation that is formally rigorous yet aesthetically sterile. For this reason, I have chosen to take the notion of 'art-research' literally: art-research provokes irreducible qualitative responses on an individual basis that have validity as research results even if not intended by the artist or explicitly elucidated in any theoretical framing text.
Digital poetry art-works themselves create complex responses that emerge from the confluence of many features. I am not suggesting that quantifiable analysis is impossible, merely that it risks eviscerating the subtle essence of aesthetic experience; it would necessitate protracted and careful work which is beyond my scope as a solitary practitioner.
Multiple complex reader-specific interpretive analysis opens pathways to understanding the idiosyncratic effect of digital poetics. In this analysis, the confluence of variables is too complex to reduce without harming or destroying the actuality of the work. This form of analysis is generalist and seeks to understand through practice and design iteration how art can be made that has an effect locally on me, the artist. It is assumed that work that resonates and 'works' intuitively and visually for one being will invariably have some sort of audience (how ever marginal that might be). In this way, I cannot argue for any generalizable conclusions, but the ability to deal with complex multimedia interfaces is left open.
Labels: design, reading, response gui
[+/-] Word separation and word order: dynamic text precursors Investigations of dynamic mobile text provoke questions about reading and readability. Readability has not always remained at the same level. Historically, two very fundamental aspects of written occidental language did not emerge until medieval times: word separation and word ordering. Prior to that time, meaning was conveyed by inflections between words which could occur in any order; and words were not separated by any space. The reader had to parse words out of a long worm of letters while holding independently all those words in memory until the meaning became clear. Word separation and word order created the conditions necessary for silent reading to occur; before that even accomplished scholars moved their lips.[Space between Words, p.11-17]
This historical context makes it clear that language is not static, it is dynamically evolving, integrating design changes that optimize comprehension. As innovations are incorporated, they also lead to unanticipated emergent spin-off technologies. The alphabetical dictionaries which emerged in the 9th century after word separation. [Space between Words, p.90]. These new design changes in language allowed authors to be free of dictation to scribes and this led to the emergence in the 11th century of the solo author whose privacy compositions included a flourishing of confessions, erotica, dream journals, heresies and interlinear notations. The modern author-editor was born; as was the human photocopier, who were illiterate painters responsible for copying the visual text of a page.[p.250-2]
In short, words did not always exist as distinct graphical units. Computational animation of these word units will be followed by animation at the letter and pixel level. Currently these animations are performed by skilled technicians (for film titles), feasible future trajectories will involve flocks of autonomous letters which breed into stories.
As an aside, the neurological state of readers has modulated in parallel with the book; as reading is a relatively recent process in evolutionary terms, the neurological activity when reading is scattered across disparate modules. The speed of adoption of potential change in reading tools is therefore constrained by the sensor apparatus responsible for decoding them: our brains. Designs therefore like species must occur within cognitive habitats that encourage their survival. It seems unfeasible to suggest that we will all suddenly adopt blurred text, occluded text, or 3D text that is always animated unless these advances are accompanied by radical optimizations of comprehension: text that is absorbed through the tongue or whose meaning is amplified through tactile or audio stimuli. Design that seeks out affordances.
1. Paul Henry Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997).(p.12)
