MachineMachine /stream

In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion?

Part Two

"There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about... writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and... I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it."

David Foster Wallace, PBS Interview, 1997

17^th Century print technology was rubbish. Type could be badly set, ink could be over-applied, misapplied or just plain missed. Paper quality varied enormously according to local resources, the luck of the seasons or even the miserly want of the print maker out to fill…