MachineMachine /blog

It is written that when the Maya people of The New World were first set upon by the Spanish cavalry it was spiritual confusion that hastened their demise. To their eyes the seething onslaught of man and horse was made of but one, new and terrifying, species of creature. In the West we might call these creatures Centaurs: liminal entities fused of two distinct species. To the Maya the border between God and beast was breached by the Spanish invaders, truly alien beings who in all but one generation would subsume the Maya under a wave of technology, disease and colonial ascent.

At the time these stories first made their way across the Atlantic ocean the Mayan Centaurs would have been seen as examples of a primitive world view. Today we tend to believe we have a clearer conception of history, one not marred by colonial aspirations or archaic stereotypes. And yet, like Edwin Hubble, staring out at an ever expanding universe, the more we look at historical events the more they seem to accelerate away from us.

I am fascinated in the appearance of things, or more precisely, in how things continue to appear the more we examine them. Like the Maya we are constrained by our perceiving eye, by the cultural reservoir within which our perceptions swim. It is as though the very fidelity of reality is determined at its point of viewing, that in some sense we will always see Centaurs where really there sit men on their horses.

…the human perceptive apparatus [has] a potential to break with action and self-organisation: to see as such, without that point of view being folded around my organizing striving centre. It is precisely the image of bounded life that Deleuze sees as the illusion that has dominated philosophy and that is overcome in the radical connections of art.

– Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed

Books are passive, denying their rigid topologies only as their pages are turned to meet each other, face-to-face. Unlike writers and readers books do not converse, do not react to stimuli, do not alter over time. Unlike a group of readers there is always only one book, and although one book may be understood a thousand ways no single book can exhibit even one of those thousand to any new reader who happens by. The human apparatus is cajoled by the book-medium into an order which delimits the extent to which the human can interface its content.

Our natural inclination is to perceive the act of writing as happening on fresh ground. The writer’s movement, of the pen or through the word-processor, gouges marks in the page that the reader re-traces.

This analogy, though, forgets the temporal dimension of the writing act. If a writer diverges from their original pathway, or backsteps in order to begin a new one, the printed page conceals their indecisive movements. At the level of the interface – the printed and bound book – only the writer’s final path is available for the reader to follow.

New mediums, such as web browsers and ebook readers, have the potential to store these divergent pathway in branching archives of potential. And for the first time in history the reader’s habits may also be gouged into the digital medium, such that a thousand readers may meet with a thousand writers, each able to marvel at the movements of the other.

Writing and reading have always happened against the illusion of permanent boundary provided by the scroll, the page, the book and the manuscript. If the medium had allowed it every pathway would have overlapped, in time, writing the acts of movement, or perception and incomprehension, into the surface of the bounded page. Like the Desire Lines made as we navigate our physical environments, exchange between text and interface should create Desire Lines through repetition and reflexion – lines that do not dictate our desires, but allow them to break free from the topologies the medium insists we traverse.