Visible Language

Continuing the special two part series Words in Space, these articles explore yet other themes: transubstantiation (in a secular sense), reference, transformation and freedom. A strong cultural thread runs through these essays.  A glance at their images clearly reveals their approach whether vernacular or artful. Each in its own way reminds us of words in space as a cultural event.

The Korean Tripitaka, created between 1236 and 1251, becomes the object of a brief Meditation on the “lastingness” of the visual record in analog or digital form as expressed through natural or technical materials.

Jean-Luc Godard used books in his early films as part of his mise-en-scène, and numerous volumes with clearly legible cover titles appear as part of the diegesis of these films. Starting with Pierre le Fou, however, Godard began to display extreme close-ups of bookcovers that were not part of the diegesis. He turned the cover titles into texts akin to silent film intertitles. His tentative use of these extradiegesis books in Pierrot le Fou became much more thorough in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle. In this film, Godard used several extreme close-ups from Gallimard’s Idées series, making the cover into found texts that serve to interpret the images that frame them. Most of these book titles in Deux ou trois choses have gone unidentified — until now. In subsequent films over the next few years, Godard continued to use bookcovers as intertitles, but, by that most im-memorial year of 1968, he began to question the value of print culture for expressing the truth.

This essay takes the short film Lost Book Found (1996) by Brooklyn-based film-maker Jem Cohen as an exemplary meditation on the materiality of writing in contemporary urban space. The film brings the materiality of the book form and the textuality of the city into contact through the memory of the narrator, who makes frustrated attempts to “read” the city and locate himself in urban space through various forms of writing: handwritten notices and flyers on the street, degraded and palimpsestic typography on the sides of buildings, prices and signs in store windows, various found objects and scraps of paper, blowing garbage tracing patterns on the sidewalk. The essay analyses these scenes of writing with reference to a number of important theorizations of urban space and argues that the film’s attention to sites of low-capital exchange and street-level commerce represents an attempt to map the individual’s relationship to a volatile urban fabric responding to postindustrial modes of investment and exchange that can occasion the rapid refashioning of entire city blocks. So doing, the film seizes on the spatialization of writing and the materiality of the book form as potentially redemptive sites for grasping the urban future and for understanding the city as a text that is ultimately authored by the material practices of those who walk its streets every day.

Satellite technologies, specifically Global Postitioning System (GPS), are new tools for naming, orienting, locating and recording movement. As a terrestrial panopticon, GPS permits a mode of performance of ‘being within’ that merges the personal and political and questions contemporary/historical ideologies in defining place. In this paper, I explore these concerns through recent examples of collaborative artworks using GPS technologies. Gesture, memory and notational traces of place reveal a poetics within an absolute lattice of exact individual locality. The literal recording of the individual’s place is re-constructed through these projects as the visible communication of the movement of gesture. Instead of constricting language to a narrow navigational-numerical space, the expression/technology relationship becomes a new starting point for aesthetic and semantic creativity.