An e|mediated rhetoric of visuality

paper
Authorship
  1. 1. Alan Robertson

    Unitec Institute of Technology

Work text
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Event 1: e|mediated typo|graphicacy
'Funny Signs' was an Acrobat 'visual lecture' for graphic design students,
comprising firstly, a 'paper' on semiotic [de]sign-as-ideology, written and
designed as screen-statements of 7-30 words (with occasional hidden
rollovers), in large white text on a black background (36 point size on the
original Quark XPress). The second part was a 'slideshow' of about 80 of my
photographs of signage and graffiti, arranged into categories of
'funniness', such as '+-' (by-hand deletions|additions to original
signage), and 'juxtapositions' (odd, amusing 'found' signage). The event
was an entirely visual, non-performance in silence (soundtrackless,
notwithstanding the e|mediated context). It was read, in absorbed silence,
by a participating audience: first, 'word-screens', reading in effect as
imagery; then photographic imagery, representing the words of signage. It
was the typographic design which at once enabled, yet also challenged the
audience to focus attentively on each screen. It is this visual nexus of
typo|graphic design-as-image-as-screen|information design which preoccupies
me.

Event 2: from visuality back to literacy
After the 'lecture' I attempted to put the 'visual' paper' back onto paper
as a 'proper' paper. Since published in TypoGraphic 56 (Journal of the
International Society of Typographic Designers) as 'Typography: the signs
of ideas', the argument which had seemed convincing in presentation,
didn't read well as literate, linear text.The process of deconstructive
typo|graphic designing by which a text is edited-by-design into concise,
sequential screen-views did not translate back directly into discursive
literacy, even though it had begun there originally. The compact,
juxtapositional purposiveness of typo|graphicacy and the almost televisual
disjunctiveness of its sequential continuity, which had seemed in
presentation to sustain meaning-making and seamless memorability for viewer
interaction with the rhythms of argument, were too short, too concise on
paper.

Furthermore, I had two papers, not one. The second part, about
responsibilities of the intellectual professional, which had 'worked' in
the 'visual lecture', didn't follow on paper. In its published iteration
the paper sketches the hegemonic privileging of reason with
written|typographic discourse, from Plato to Kant and Peirce, pointing to
the parallel presence of an 'other', peripheral humanistic tradition: a
recasting of the Romantic|Enlightenment paradigm-shift (Tarnas 10) within a
design context (Wilson). It suggests that e|media may signal a
"paradigmatic shift from the stasis of typographic textuality to a 'winged'
(Mitchell) remediation", of 'imagic' typo|graphicality and argues that
graphic design exemplifies the five arts of rhetoric so deplored by Plato.
It concludes with the somewhat breathless hope that e|mediation might
instantiate an on-line 'globalocality' of public space and dialogic public
language (Arendt, Bauman) to counter the dominating dialectics of
technocratic corporatism. Finally it reiterates Lanham's suggestion that
e|media has facilitated a kind of secondary visual orality of email (and
now txt mssgng) in which dialogue returns to the centre of communication.

What that paper does not do, is to query the intrinsic rhetoricality of
typo|graphic design through application of rhetoric itself as an
'interpretive instrument' (Gaonkar 50) to mediate a prevailing culture of
overwhelming rhetorical visuality in which graphic design is uncritically
accepted as a powerfully hegemonic medium of 'communication'. Nor does it
address the darker implications of a globalised network of 'broadcaught'
(Negroponte) media, in which, as Virilio has pithily put it, "interactivity
is is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere".

Event 3: from literacy to a rhetoric of typo|graphic visuality
In presenting this paper I will attempt to demonstrate the rhetorical
efficacy of typo|graphic visuality as a public discourse-by-presentation.
What you are reading now is visibly, typographically literate, but not
typo|graphically visual. The typography of discursive codex-text (Lanham)
must be seen to be read, but it does not exemplify the graphicacy of what
we are familiar with as 'graphic design' in consumerist society. I will not
argue that grasping 'graphics' is as different from reading writing, as
'reading' books is different from 'viewing' television (a familiar
argument: see Paglia|Postman), but rather, reiterate that the rhetoricality
implicit in that difference can be particularly significant in
e|mediation. The online screen is a uniquely responsive (interactive?)
visual mediation of otherness, yet one which has evolved within a culture
attuned to televisuality (e|media and television share the same
screen-format as I discuss below). On television typographic textuality
disappears. As Bolter puts it "the text is absorbed into the video image" .
But the e|medium puts graphic design back on screen, this time with an
expanded hermeneutic remit for designing an explicitly rhetorical
typo|graphic visuality.

Expressly, as an ideological medium of persuasion in corporatist society,
graphic design is complicit in the consumerism of over-expansionist
productivism.
Yet paradoxically graphic design visually exemplifies the five arts of the
rhetorical padaeia by which the participatory dialogue of the democratic
public sphere was performed. Wit is derived from the invention of
unexpected and original conceptual|visual juxtapositions. Argument may well
be sustained through 'copywritten' textuality, but moreso through the
overall coherence of the visual composition, the design of the three
constitutive elements: text, display text, and imagery. It is this 'imagic'
coherence of visuality which constitutes the true rhetorical heart of the
'performance'. (I have coined 'imagic' to describe the peculiar union of
image-as-imagery, with 'image' as 'perceived public reputation', which is
central to the rhetoricality of visual 'communication'.) Styling, in the
typo|graphic fashion or 'look' of the moment, can be so significant a
concern as to either dominate user-perception as the 'true' message (bad
'design'), or to be exploited by poor designers as a substitute for
invention and argument (even worse 'design'). And finally the artefact is
delivered through a highly finished technical grammar and technology of
reproduction.

Visual constraints of the e|medium
Print and 'onscreen' discursive visualities are different 'conduits'
through which the visible abstraction of language may be 'delivered' (Reddy
284) as designed visual 'communication'. Print and onscreen e|mediation are
privately accessed while presentations (whether e|mediated or not) are
publicly (group)read, and often employ conventions such as bullet-point
phrases which are rarely intended for contiguous reading, like codex-text,
or to be comprehensively coherent as standalone documents.Yet a
presentation is onscreen e|mediation writ large, requiring only the
addition of way-finding conventions for direct user-access and control.But
in designing appropriately for e|mediated graphicacy , there are other
visual considerations too.

The e|medium has inherited the landscape-format used universally in
traditional image-centred media (cameras, television, cinema). Thus
'landscape' is associated with imagery. Even static, juxtapositional
typo|graphic design seems to make more visual sense as 'landscape'. The
availability of unlimited free colour reinforces this bias towards imagery
(just like television) provoking implicitly 'imagic' expectations in the
screen-viewer. For, like print periodicals, screens are both 'viewed' and
'read'. But not only are screens wide they are small in size relative to
their resolution. A typical 17" screen is A4 on its side, yet its
equivalent legible resolution is extremely coarse by comparison with
paper.Screen-wide, single-columns of small, print-size html text, then,
will be even more unreadable than on paper. Because visual 'real estate' is
limited onscreen, instincts are to pack every visible pixel with as much
'information' as possible, thereby ignoring the dual medium-specific
virtues of either unlimited virtual screen-size, and|or virtually-unlimited
screen availability. Worse it denies any need for design-sense. As Edward
Tufte has noted, the problem in dealing with information overload is not
its complexity, but rather the quality of its designed organisation. As
such, 'authoring' e|media is as much about designing as writing, and
interrogates conventional perceptions of what either writing or
typo|graphic designing entails.

Practising typo|graphicacy
My 'writing|designing-as-I-go' process of translating linear text into
compact 'screen-bites' necessarily requires a literate editorial capability
informed by both visual and typo|graphic designing sensibilities. For the
writer, inventing a rigorous, seemingly rational, 'well-arranged' argument
will constitute the major task of writing, while 'style' and 'delivery',
will be construed as secondary. This is consistent with the Ramist
inheritance (Ong, Lanham) in which 'neutrality', 'authority' and
'rationality' became elided with typographic literacy. Because it was
self-contained, self-referential and abstract, typographic textuality
aspired to an 'objectivity' which eschewed any taint of the 'subjectively'
rhetorical. Not only did print beget the myth of the 'original' author
(Poster), but also the myths that neither 'originality' nor 'neutrality'
nor 'objectivity' were in themselves intrinsically rhetorical conceits.

But is not writing itself a design-mediated act? And if rhetoric is the
design art at the centre of writing then a designing consciousness must
drive all communication. The arts of rhetoric exemplify the inventive
ambiguity of human art-making in which originality and the rule-following
of practical craftship are seamlessly integrated. And similarly, as the
seams between intention and artefact in rhetoric seem particularly
transparent (Kaufer) so are they in typo|graphic designing: after all,
people have been reading type for five hundred years. Consumerist graphic
design is literally and functionally rhetorical, yet its true rhetoricality
is implicit as visuality. As an ubiquitous and overtly persuasive form of
cultural production, its hegemonic power operates through the paradoxical
invisibility of its visuality. Graphic design is so critically unquestioned
and so popularly accepted not just as normal as print, but as the defining
'image' of what print means as a 'communication' medium, that it is itself
the message; and the message is the rhetorical visuality of the imagic.

Animating typo|graphicacy
The 'dynamic rhetoric' (Bonsiepe 75) of animation introduces more than an
additional disciplinary dimension. Animated typographic 'figures of speech'
(Bonsiepe 72) facilitate a particularly explicit visual rhetoricality. For
example, in a very short animation 'What is 'creativity' in graphic
design?' (in my visual lecture 'The End of Graphic Design') animated
typography deconstructs and re-presents internally coherent textual
complexity as subtle variations on the same key concepts. E|mediated
animation also enables text to oscillate as dense and static linearity,
typo|graphics, and a time-base, imagic fusion of form and content;
simultaneously subject to both televisual disjunctivity and the associative
discontinuity of user-controlled hypertextual non-linearity.

Designing text to be both graphic|discursive, and static|dynamic opens
structural gaps by means of content-derived visual juxtapositions which
liberate meaning, clarify associated concepts, reveal otherwise inchoate
links, and designate visual hierarchies of emphasis. As a simultaneous
instantiation of meaningful formality, by design, typo|graphicacy can
mediate the paradoxical 'fissure' at the heart of rhetoric: that "division
of the logos into form and content" (Hariman 227). It can emancipate a
hermeneutic understanding of the analytical processes and constraints to
which it is itself subject, thereby transcending the sleight of hand by
which 'commercial' graphic design conceals its complicity in the hegemonic
dissemination of top-down consumerist message-making.But only if it is
explicitly designed for this purpose. And it can expose the 'designing'
consciousness behind all literacy, the implicit rhetoricality of all
communication. Then it serves a hermeneutic of ethical communications, a
kind of 'information design' which supports audience understanding,
reasoning and reflection, outside the hegemony of a mechanistic media
construct which excludes "context, history, expectations, goals,
values,priorities, feelings, preferences and differences of intelligence"
(Frascara). It is in the deceptive visual simplicity of good graphic design
that the knowing, ironic oscillation of postmodern discourse is most
convincingly suasive, revealing what Thomas Frank and Judith Williamson
identify as the true rhetorical agenda of visual 'communication': its
'hipness'; its capacity for engendering a shared knowingness of
transgression. In short, what makes it 'cool'.

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Conference Info

In review

ACH/ALLC / ACH/ICCH / ALLC/EADH - 2001

Hosted at New York University

New York, NY, United States

July 13, 2001 - July 16, 2001

94 works by 167 authors indexed

Series: ACH/ICCH (21), ALLC/EADH (28), ACH/ALLC (13)

Organizers: ACH, ALLC

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