Week 7
Coordinating Sight and Sound
This week we are exploring the relationship between sound and sight, which in turn is a transition from orality and graphism. An important moment in the history of these two senses appears in the “Renaissance” or Early Modern Period where poets, visual artists, and craftsmen began the serious work of coordinating the two. That is, there was an intense search to find a common language (code) for both sight and sound so that images could become words and words could become images.
We will briefly explore three distinct domains, each of which plays a role in the coordination of these two senses: linear perspective, mechanical writing (typography or print), and the emblem. The common element among each of these domains is their emphasis on what Bruno Latour calls the mobility and immutability of inscriptions as immutable mobiles.
Linear Perspective
Latour’s example of map making is revealing in this process of sense coordination (5-6): the ability to draw an accurate map requires a set of physical tools and mental representational ability that did not exist in oral cultures. In addition to accurate representations, one had to have the ability to travel and then bring the representation home: the representation had to be mobile. The coordination of sight and sound first begins by the ability to represent an object both in space and time so that it does not change: to make the representation immutable. As such, inscriptions had to become rationalized and coordinated, both the iconic representation (images) and the arbitrary representations of sound (language). In the fourteenth, fifteen and sixteenth centuries, linear perspective offered optical consistency, or the ability to translate both fact and fiction into the codes of the illusion of three dimensions in two-dimensional space. Suddenly, all images had the same code, fictional as it was.
Through linear perspective, the real becomes fictional and the fictional becomes real based on the common code of representing everything as it appears to the eye (as opposed to God, the imagination or memory). Fact and fiction have a new meeting place, namely, consistent images that could now be described with words.
A brief history of the practice of linear perspective:
Renaissance_Art.pdfMechanical writing: Typography
The next step, after technologizing sight, is the mechanization of sound. Per Latour, printing, the mechanization of writing, did not offer radical mental changes or reduce the magical or irrational elements of thought that existed in the middle ages. Rather, what typography allowed was the exchange of ALL ideas among doctors, theologians, natural philosophers, artists, and poets AT THE SAME TIME.
The image to the right reveals the effects of print on graphic representations: now a book can be a teacher on how to improve one's penmanship, which is a form of adapting the human body to technology. Each of these hands is fictional (a representation), yet believable because of the use of shading and depth (they look like hands).
The ability to represent and share ALL ideas—the good and bad, the real and fictional, the absurd and the magical—allowed for a comparison of potential uses. Verbal utterance, which had become written images, now became mechanically produced images that could be tested against other representations. Those which were more clear and distinct were repeated. Those representations where words were unclear, indistinct, or deceptive, were omitted.
In addition to words attempting to interpret images, as Ong has showed us, words also became images. Typography, which requires the translation of sound into a graphic character, the translation of the graphic character into a matrix, and the use of that matrix to finally create letter punches. These new moveable types were inserted into a mechanical press, arranged into forms for printing, which required the mass production of paper, the process of binding the finished pages in to a book, and finally the ability to distribute these books to growing audiences. This mechanization of writing radically disrupted the communication process where a scribe writes and a reader reads. Now, one sender could print an idea and have it be read by innumerable readers. The exacting specifications of typography in turn had a recursive effect on speech: each word had to be spoken as a verbal representation of a mechanically produced image.
Emblem: history and definition
In order to get a better sense of how inscriptions work, as well as the slow process of coordinating sight and sound, we will be reading (looking at, interpreting, or criticizing) George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635). To get the most out of this playful and serious multi-media artefact, it will be helpful to have a definition of what an emblem was in the Early Modern Period.
An emblem has a long history, even though the modern meaning of the word only retains a trace of the meanings popular in England and continental Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Whereas today, the word emblem means “an image or object that is a symbol for something else,” its etymology comes from the art of engraving, carving or cutting ornamental details into a material object. From ancient Greek statues, monuments, and other sculptural objects, to “emblematize” something is to carve decorative inlays.
In the sixteenth century (1531), the first “emblem book” was published by accident: Andrea Alciato, an Italian lawyer, began collecting inscriptions from tomb stones on his travels around Europe. Similar to Esther Ingils meditative verses, Alciato shared these short moral verses with a friend. A German printer obtained access to these short verses and printed them along with small woodcut images and a brief interpretation.
Thus, the emblem, as it would be understood for the next several hundred years, was born. After 1531, printed emblems became standardized and acquired a three-part form that united a short motto or title (inscriptio), an image (pictura), and interpretive poem (subscriptio). In terms of quantity, the emblem was the most printed and distributed artistic and literary genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, with emblem books numbering in the thousands and emblems themselves numbering in the millions.
Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes reveals the cosmopolitan status of the literary world in the early 17th century: etchings from Holland, poetry from outside of London, topics from ancient Greece, Egypt, the Far East, and new discoveries of the Americas. In addition, original poems that accompanied the etchings were deleted so Wither could add his own English verses.
The playful tone of Wither’s letters to the reader, the “lottery” game (spinning the wheel), and the allegorical images all conceal the importance of this seemingly harmless social game: each play trained players (both men and women in a leisure setting) how to successfully coordinate sight and sound, writing and images, while instructing moral behavior.
Here is a brief intro to the Emblem
Emblems_website.pdf