READING MACHINE:
A CRYPTO-TYPOGRAPHY
MFA thesis
2006
112 pages
9.5 x 9.5 inches
This is a reading of Gyorgy Kepes’s Language of Vision.
This is a typographic essay which opens non-linguistic enclosures of modernism to exigencies of textuality. (“the grid announces...modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” (Rosalind Krauss, The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths, 1985, p 9)
The essay conducts an investigation into the formal language of a computational hermeneutics. It compiles an index of significant terms in Kepes’s hermetic text and visualizes their recurrences and concatenations throughout his book. In the course of this anaylsis, the visual ramifications of specific textual technologies are drawn, of lines of reading in printed books and of the crossing linkages which constitute hypertext.
The essay is at once a careful discursive examination of the foundations and limitations of modernist form, and a forward-looking elaboration of what new lines of reading might be imagined and inscribed-—in which typography and data electronically break the static surface of the printed artifact to crystallize new figures of meaning and information.
MFA installation
line
I draw, first, a series of lines.
some new complicating horizon develops through the lines exactly in the place of that discursive exchange which is the promise of any text meant for reading.
depth
a second dream: of a formal automatization of meaning,
memex
provisional indexical tracings of the hidden correspondences between the two historically coincident landmark design texts.
installation
An electronic installation was mounted as part of the 2006 UIC MFA show in graphic design.
The double pages of the book were projected onto a 3x6 foot table, whose surface was wired to respond to touch and talk with the projector to advance the pages.
This was a first attempt to test the project of public reading.
group show poster
