Motion capture technology...?

Hi Anna, responding just one last time to the Rotman... and his mention of motion capture technologies and our discussion of gesture.

I like this image (above) very much. It is an image of Vsevolod Meyerhold's system of biomechanics. In short, biomechanics was a rigorous training system through which Meyerhold sought to standardise and refine the movements of the body to act as a kind of language. By establishing these "etudes", Meyerhold wanted to establish a system of communication through isolating and slowing down movement in order that these gestures could express certain actions, intentions and be understood. 

Meyerhold wanted to breakdown the illusion of theatre in order to show its mechanical structures and he included the body and language within this. There's some fantastic images of the way in which he achieved this breaking down of the illusion of theatre by extending the stage into the auditorium and showing the mechanical workings of the sets etc.. 

But in terms of language, I think Meyerhold's interest in the body as a kind of machine (evident in the rigorous training his actors undertook, for example) is particularly interesting in relation to the question of motion capture technologies, because here (in the image above) we see the body capturing movement as a form of language much in the manner in which Rotman suggests motion capture or kinetic technologies might do. And therefore, we can consider the photographs of these movements to be a kind of notation or alphabet (in Rotman's terms).

Reading Group 2 - The Gutenberg Galaxy and Sesame Street

Wednesday 6th March, 6pm

Leading on from the first reading group meeting where we discussed Brian Rotman's take on alphabetic writing, its affect on Western subjectivity and its displacement by new technologies in Becoming Beside Ourselves, we will be reading two more texts about the alphabet:

An extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy - Marshall McLuhan
And  Brought to you by the letter I - Jessica Winter 

>> to book a place and to receive an email with both texts

Written in 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy makes a much more nuanced analysis of the affect of alphabetic technology in two stages - pre and post the advent of the printed word following Gutenberg's first use of moveable type around 1439.





Jessica Winter - Brought to you by the letter I

I. The pleasure of the text

“I invited a friend of mine over for dinner,” says the man ruefully. The gray-faced, middle-aged fellow is a squiggly animation, made of skinny, put-upon lines that form sluggish shapes. His dinner guest is nothing like him. The little friend who bounces through the French doors is the letter M, angular and robust. M has googly eyes at the tops of his twin peaks, which extend downward to become super-springy legs and dancing feet that also serve as his hands. M hops into his host’s outstretched palm, then rubs against his jowls like a cat. The gray man, beleaguered by these shows of affection, trudges toward a grand table piled with a colorful smorgasbord, plus candelabra. He slumps in his seat and invites the bug-eyed M to dig in. “Mmmmm, marvelous!” the M cries. “Meat! Munch! Magnificent!” M’s center of gravity is his mouth; a rib-eye steak, a loaf of bread, a glass of wine vanish into the V-shaped dip. The bottom point of this center “V” is also a straw, slurping up a glass of milk in one go. “Milk!” he says. The two upside-down Vs on either side of M’s mouth are pincers, chomping instantaneously through an entire melon. “Mmm-melon!” he says.

>> download PDF from The Serving Library

Language Sounds and Artificial Voices

Discussion on Wednesday 20th February at 6pm with

Roger K Moore, Professor of Spoken Language Processing, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Sheffield.
Ranjan Sen, Researcher in the sounds of language and language change, School of English, University of Sheffield.

Click here to book

After some preliminary conversations with Roger and Ranjan last week I began to think about how although they are from very different fields, both of them work to construct voices that are in some sense artificial - either computer generated for use in technology (Roger), or reconstructing the sounds of dead languages and tracking phonetic change over time (Ranjan).  And while their approaches have different aims I wonder if there may be some overlap in their methodology, and the insights each gains into how language is stored and processed in the mind.

Real and fictional examples of synthesised speech

Frances Stark talking about her video work My Best Thing which she created in part using free text to speech and animation software xtranormal.com
She says "the viewer / audience can have an experience that's very intimate and tender despite the fact that it's two computer voices".  In fact the tenderness and emotion seem to be emphasised by the disjunction between the automatic and synthetic quality of the voices and the content of the words they speak.
This raises a few questions in regard to the Brian Rotman text we discussed at the reading group in which he portrays writing as a poor and limiting encoding of the voice.  In My Best Thing however, which essentially turns a written script into sound in the simplest and most automatic way possible, the text seems to hold more emotional and expressive content than it could have done as a straight forward speech act.
Later in the interview she describes writing as 'being myself on a keyboard'.

Stephen Hawking
Despite the fact that the synthesised speech Stephen Hawking uses now sounds very out of date he doesn't replace it because it has become his 'voice' and is instantly recognisable.

Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey

The voice of the computer as imagined by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 is very 'human' except for its cool impassive tone.

Wall-e

Wall-e on the other hand communicates almost entirely through tonal, emotional noises  and has virtually no words - only a few names.  The other robot, Eva, has a few more words but is similarly good at conveying a lot of emotion and meaning through her tone.  This is a pixar film for children and Wall-e and Eva seem to display aspects of a child-like, prelinguistic communication compared to the 'adult' and law-making voice of the ship's computer which is a detached female version of Hal.

Reply to Bridget's thoughts on gesture

I think that's a really interesting quote you picked up on about the possibility of handwriting containing gesture, he goes on to say:

But the effect, to the extent it exists, is tenuous and not uniform enough to serve any reliable communicative function. In any event, it was effectively eliminated from public texts with the arrival of printing and increasingly from private ones by typewriting. (p26)

I found this really puzzling especially given that he allows gesticulation, eye movements while speaking and even the use of a computer mouse to be part of his repository of 'gesture' and embodiment of language, and yet does not include handwriting and typing. It seems he has already decided that anything used to arrange letters in order or on the page cannot be gestural, and yet as you point out there are many examples in concrete poetry and scoring where gesture and expression are precisely foregrounded through written forms of words or notation. 

Rotman seems to view alphabetic writing solely as a poor copy or score for speech. Where he does allow it a power of its own to create abstract and imagined realms he casts it in a negative light - as an undesirable byproduct he terms 'ghost effect' (his examination of the disembodied subject, mathematical infinity and monotheistic religion in Chapter 5). He doesn't entertain the possibility that this capacity for abstraction might offer a powerful and extraordinary possibility for mediation through which both meaning and texture might be delivered back to us magnified and through which something new might be discovered or created (although he does suggest that this happens within mathematics). He sees literature as an attempt to redress a lack, not as a positive creative form:

....the history of reading is the history of redressing what writing fails to represent. Or, the same thing, the history of writing consists principally of attempts to find readable equiva­lents and alternatives to the vocal prosody necessarily absent from it. Lack­ing vocal gesture, writing was obliged to construct its own modes of force, its own purely textual sources of affect, which it accomplished through two dialectically opposed - or better, co-evolutionary -principles of cre­ation: transduction (the discourses of narrative prose) and mimesis (the voices of poetic diction). (p27)

And a final thought on linearity which he also lays at the alphabet's door: although a text is usually presented on the page, and read, linearly, he doesn't consider the fact that texts are rarely written linearly since what writing enables is a dialogue between writer, idea and text that flows back and forth through revision. It seems that speech is actually the more linear form since it flows out of a mouth in time - its creation and delivery occurring simultaneously.

Some thoughts on gesture

Hi Anna, I'm sorry that I can't make the reading group tonight but I have had some thoughts and questions regarding chapters 1 & 2 of the Brian Rotman book that I thought might be relevant... have a look, I think my questions are around the affects or afterlives of text. Best, Bridget

In Chapters 1 & 2 of Becoming Beside Ourselves, Brian Rotman sets up an analysis of the world in which we are governed by notation – specifically the alphabet. He suggests that the alphabet has constrained us by reducing (and confining) our experience into the shape and form of its letters, and as well as mediating our understanding of a text through these very forms. Therefore, his claim is that alphabetic writing captures us twofold – one, by reducing our experience to shapes or forms on a page, and two by limiting our understanding of a subject through the form of its notation. This leads Rotman to make the rather startling statement that the alphabet is non-gestural. He writes that:

…alphabetic writing eliminates all and any connection speech has to the body's gestures. One might object that handwritten alphabetic texts evade this total disjunction from gesture. ·Written emphasis, uncertainty, rhythm, discontinuity, stress, tailing off, and other scriptive traces of the body, might be said to be the handwriting correlates to certain rudimentary forms of vocal gestures.
(Rotman, p. 25-6)

Rotman therefore articulates a division between the alphabet (stillness, notation) and the expressive nature of the body (gesture). He later extends this to a division between alphabetic writing and digital forms of “writing” such as motion capture technologies, which he suggests are able to return gesture to writing by utilizing a more kinetic and movement based approach to writing through the use of motion capture and other digital technologies.

I am curious about this division that Rotman makes between alphabetic writing as reducing the gesture and expressiveness of speech, and digital technologies as having the capacity for a true or real expression of the voice. So my initial question is: how is alphabetic writing gestural?

Q. How can alphabetic writing be gestural?

Immediately, I read the passages (pp.25-6, and later 49-53 ish) in which Rotman discusses alphabetic writing and gesture, and what he calls the “gesturo-haptic resources of the digital” (p.49) – I thought of three wildly divergent things:

1. The work of concrete poets who explore exactly this question in their use of typography and other forms of notation to experiment with the way in which alphabetic writing or notation is gestural. Examples might include Dom Silvester Houdard (whose work you’ve included on the blog already) and Bob Cobbing.
2. I also thought of passages in Cornelius Cardew’s “Treatise Handbook” in which he writes of the joy of discovering an expressive system of notation to give form to his music, writing in a note on the score itself that: “the sound should be a picture of the score and not vice versa.”
3. And finally, I thought of a series of drawings by an Australian artist Christian Capurro (Compress, 2001-ongoing) in which he erases images from a magazine leaving not the image of what has been erased but what is produced on an underlying page by the pressure of the act of erasure. While this is not alphabetic writing per say as he erases images, it suggests to me the way in which a form such as writing or an image goes off into the world and produces its own set of actions and affects that might take us unawares. So that the drawings that comprise this series are the accidental product of a kind of automatic writing and are produced as an affect of another action.

…and this final thought leads me to the question of ghosts and as I haven’t yet read Chapter 5: Ghost Effects, I’m hoping that those that attend the reading group this evening might have some thoughts to contribute on this subject!

So just to round off by saying that I'm not sure that I agree with the clear division that Rotman seems to make between the digital as being more able to express the gestural and kinetic nature of gesture than older more analogue forms of notation because I think that art and experimental poetry practices have shown us how the alphabet and other forms of notation might lift off the page in their own gestural expression (if that doesn't sound too fanciful?).

Bibliography

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Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, Fontana Press, 1977

Baxter, Timothy. The Cratylus: Plato’s critique of naming

Bök, Christian.  Crystallography, Coach House Books, 2003

            Eunoia, Canongate, 2001

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Bradley, Arthur.  Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Edinburgh 2008

de Brugerolle, Marie (Ed). Guy De Cointet, JRP|Ringier, 2011

Crone, Bridget (Ed). The Sensible Stage – Staging and the Moving Image, Picture This / Plenty Projects, 2012

Culler, Jonathan (Ed).  On Puns – the foundations of letters, Blackwell, 1988

Derrida, Jacques - translated G.C. Spivak.  Of Grammatology, John Hopkins 1997

Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More, MIT Press, 2006

Durkin, Philip.  The Oxford Guide to Etymology, Oxford, 2009

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Goldsmith, Kenneth.  Uncreative Writing, Columbia University Press, 2011

Hoban, Russell. Fremder, Bloomsbury, 2002

Joseph, John E.  Limiting the Arbitrary: Linguistic naturalism and its opposites in Plato’s Cratylus & modern theories of language.

Kostelanetz, Richard (Ed). Breakthrough Fictioneers, Something Else Press, 1973

McLuhan, Marshal. The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, 1962

McManus, Denis.  The Enchantment of Words – Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Oxford University Press, 2006

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Plato - translated C.D.C. Reeve, Cratylus, Hackett 1998

Rotman, Brian.  Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being, Duke University Press, 2008

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Simpson, Nicola (Ed).  Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter – The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard.  
Occasional Papers, 2012

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig.  The Blue and Brown Books, Harper Perennial, 1960

Bulletins of The Serving Library #3.  Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language, Dexter Sinister, 2012

Arrangement for the opening conversation