Revision as of 17:10, 11 April 2010

Sphere. Now stretch your imagination a little, and conceive of a Square in Flatland, moving parallel to itself upward.
I. What? Northward?
Sphere. No, not Northward; upward; out of Flatland altogether.

Alternative quote:

You who are blessed with shade as well as light, you who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colors, you who can actually see an angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a Circle in the happy realm of the Three Dimensions--how shall I make it clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one another's configurations?

- A. Square, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presents an unusual view of the history of human nature: “the primeval man was round, his back and sides formed a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.” Zeus, threatened by these children of sun, moon, and earth, splits them in two so they “will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers.” In this story Aristophanes locates the origin of love. He could just as easily locate the origin of inscription media.

In this dossier we look at flatness not solely as a tactile characteristic—our walls, floors, and desks reveal that to be thriving—but as a characteristic of organization. The two dimensional perspective of the torn human, realized in the initial single planar creation of tablet, scroll, and maps, defies Zeus by evolving into the multiplanar media of the codex and the globe. This media not only recreates the multi-directional, 360^O view but expands it to include innumerable steradians. The speedy tumbling ideal of pre-humanity, lost to direct human physiology due to the wrath of the gods, is regained through speedy three dimensional searching.

Introduction idea of flatness= planner, simplicity, functionality not aesthetic

Bodies of Inscription

The flatness of the initial inscription bodies—clay and stone tablets—delineated the boundaries of thought, leading to a flatness of perspective. Some of the oldest written records Mesopotamia contain information about agriculture and “later tablets contain information about the social structure of the Sumerians” (Jean 13). These tablets were both uni-topical and uni-sided. The press of weight from the heavy objects made double sided inscription difficult, and the limited space made multi-topical exploration literally unthinkable.

The transition to flexible inscription mediums, papyrus and later parchment in Egypt and paper in China broadened the capabilities for inscription. However these capabilities did not initially broaden the single planar mind set. Papyrus scrolls varied in length and size, but not in readings method. "The Latin or Greek volume was read from left to right, and when the scroll was held in the hands, the already-read portion was often rolled up in the left hand while the still-to-be read text was unrolled from the right, not unlike the way we handle the pages of a book being read today...scrolling on computer screens takes its name from the way scrolls worked, and no matter the manner in which it was read, when a scroll was finished it would have to be rewound to be read again very much as with a modern videotape after it is viewed" (Petroski 25). Text would be written in columns, a format remediated in magazine publications. But just as clay and stone restricted space, scrolls restricted searchability due to the arduous nature of physically wrapping and unwrapping to reveal the contained text. Additionally, meta-text was attached to the ends of scrolls “with tags or tickets, not unlike modern price tags, which were marked to give the necessary information, such as descriptive words, author, and the like" (Petroski 25-26). Easily detached, the loss of these tags easily led to confusion about the contents. Although storage was easier than with stone, scroll storage was not unfettered. A multi-scroll document would be kept upright in a box or gathered in a shelf cubby, with the limit on the latter that too great a weight from the top would crush the scrolls, which fell to the bottom. Slate or wax writing tablets offered an additional convenient option, but each lacked permanence as inscription mediums.

"The codex form is not the only alternative for presenting text. It predominates as a form in the present because it is much easier to use than the scroll, much less cumbersome than the tablet, actually much less fragile than wax tablets and slates" (White 33).

"A new way of binding or of writing things down, a change in the way data are collected, affects the legal framework. It is only in such a diachronic description that the discourse of the law assumes its specific appearances. Only then, by turning into parchment codices, string-tied convolutes, or standardized chrome folders, do files acquires face, form, and format" (Vismann xiii).

"It is the books of reference that think to make use of leaves, sheets, numbered pages, and the fact that all pages of all copies are identical" (Kenner 59).

Stone Clay Flexible Mediums Codex/binding Vismann Pops and Hisses Bad Weather

Hypertext

Maps

Maps are a mode of mediating the inner world of human experience and the outer physical world. While the earliest maps were utilized to express spatial knowledge of a certain place, they have gone on to express other relationships. The type of maps we are talking about here are specific to the two dimensional maps that display geographic information in graphical detail and are still utilized today. While it is difficult to understanding when map making truly began, it is undoubtedly not a modern invention. The British museum has an example of a Babylonian clay table that has a representation of the world dating from the 5th century BCE, displaying their belief that the world was round surrounded by a ocean (Tooley, p. 3). The earth as flat paradigm was debated during the Hellenic time period. But the Greeks did make globes, and Ptolemy developed longitude and latitude (Tooley, p.5).

Globes provide a way to view the world’s geography without distortions. Modern maps are actually projections of the globe onto a flat surface. What is interesting, is that while we utilize our knowledge of the earth as a sphere to make the most accurate maps, Globe gores that have been used since the beginning of globe making. Gores are maps of the Earth printed in flat, roughly triangular sections and then attached to a sphere. The flat characteristic is remediated from the globe.

crary how we see the world zeilinski globes as remediating maps

Digital Maps

Google Maps

Deliberate Flatness

The creation of flat media is still in existence, however now flatness is created as an aesthetic choice. Because flatness has become a choice in the creation of media and not just the way things are, to call this mode of mediation simply “flatness” would ignore many things that separate it from previous forms of flatness. Thus this remediation of flatness, we can refer to as deliberate flatness. Deliberate flatness can be used to call attention to call attention to either the medium or the content of the medium depending on how it is used. In either case the use of deliberate flatness is recognized and considered for its effects on the way in which we interact with any medium.

By calling attention to itself as flat, deliberately flat media are created with an acknowledgement (if only winkingly so sometimes) that flatness has become part of the functional nonsense of media. That is, we use flatness now as not just something that is a given in media, but that by having flatness within media we are able to produce a very specific message. Deliberate flatness is rarely the content, but the form media take. This is use of deliberate flatness will only work so long as it remains obvious that flatness is a trait of the medium.

Deliberate flatness in media does not actually produce flat media. Many modern media that are made to appear flat have complex content which produces a juxtaposition within the user of the media. In this way, deliberate flatness can be thought of as artificial simplicity. The effects of this are to either produce a metadialogue about the media or to avoid that kind of discussion as much as possible. Effectively, this choice comes to whether or not media producers want their consumers to be dazzled by their creations or to consider them as creations.

Deliberate Flatness in Art

While flatness has always been a trait of painting, it is only with Modernist painting that we begin to see painting’s flatness as something to be aware of. In his essay Modernist Painting, Clement Greenberg describes flatness as one of the distinctive features of pictorial art. Flatness, for Greenberg is also the thing that all Modernist is commenting on and bringing to the front. This is a drastic parting from older traditions which “acknowledged [flatness] only implicitly or indirectly” (Greenberg). Flatness was not something that had to be worked around by a painter any more, it had become something to cherish. With this new freedom artists then were able to abandon the illusion of space produced by art to force their audiences into thinking about the art’s flatness. This turns the discussion of work of art into a discussion of art itself.

With all of this revelry in flatness, Greenberg also acknowledges that with any sort of brushstroke on a canvas there is the distraction of flatness. When a Modernist painter makes anything she produces a “strictly optical third dimension” which “can only be seen into; can be traveled through, literally or figuratively, only with the eye (Greenberg). This turns painting into a purely visual medium with any kind of escapist ability, once again bringing the art back to being in many ways a commentary on itself.

So here within art, maybe one of the most complex modes of mediation, deliberate flatness is produced, but it is created with a purpose. By using flatness Modernist painters were able to make deep commentary on not just the techniques of art, but on art as a way of seeing the world.

Deliberately Flat Technology

While it could be seen as a purely practical use of flatness, the way in which data is stored for computers has become increasingly flat. While machine-readable data was stored on something flat, these things never seemed flat to us thanks to the surface of the medium itself, such as the grooves of the vinyl record. Flatness was never an issue with records because the text of the record was within the grove, thus making flatness into blankness. And in other forms of machine-readable data, such as magnetic tape, flatness existed, but in a similar fashion to the scroll as a fundamental quality of the medium. Both media paradigms make flatness seem strange to even consider.

With the introduction of the compact disc flatness suddenly was brought to the front of media. The CD changed the way information was stored and, with this change, turned flatness into a language. Of course, this is not technically true. CDs have very small impressions on their surface, but to the unaided human these impressions are impossible to notice (Pohlmann). While the use of machine-written storage media had already created a public comfortable with machines that could “read themselves” as representing technology, the media before CDs were still reading a text which, even if not quite perceivable, was at least connected to a cinematic understanding of media (Gitelman 64). The CD then was hailed as revolutionary because of its deliberate flatness while changing the way we think about memory. To remember something requires a way to see patterns in a place where there is no visible pattern. It is as if all the marks ever made on Freud’s magic writing pad could only be seen on the bottom surface and never the top. To read the pad one would have to know how to lift the top layer and read carefully the constantly written over indentations. This turns flatness into a barrier that must be lifted before memory (much less the memories content) can be revealed.

This deliberate flatness makes things look like they are much simpler to understand and operate though. So much so is this the case that other forms of media are working toward flatness as a way of manufacturing a flatness that represents simplicity. Probably the most recent example of this is the Apple iPad. While a highly complex piece of technology, it is leverages its flatness as a way of making the public more comfortable with using it. Deliberate flatness for the iPad is used in a way to exceed our understanding of how it works in order for it to seem “magical” (iPad). As the iPad’s advertisement even says, “It is hard to see how something so simple, so thin, and so light could possibly be so capable” (iPad). The iPad, like most other consumer electronics, is flat to give the machine’s functions a sense of great depth of wonderment while creating a black box which protects the consumer from being forced to know just how anything works.

Face Value etymology

Face value was used first around 1878 to describe the value expressed on bank notes and postage stamps. The word 'face' is from late 13th century French from the word Facia which means "appearance, form or figure" and secondarily "visage, countenance." The noun could be related to 'facere' which means "to make."

Sources

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines. Standford University Press: Stanford. 1999.

Greenberg, Clement. Modernist Painting. Forum Lectures. Voice of America: Washington D.C. 1960.

iPad Video. Apple. Accessed April 10, 2010.

Pohlmann, Ken C. The Compact Disc Handbook. A-R Editions Inc: Middleton. 1992.