A summary of some of the effects of digital media on language, plus some imagining, on my part, as to what could happen.

Gabriëlle Marks, Media-GN, June 1999

TYPORALITY: an introduction; Digital media and language; Digital media and the act of reading; Digital media and the act of writing; Digital media and the act of speech; TYPORALITY continued…

TYPORALITY: an introduction
To philosophize about language would seem to require words about words. But thinking of words about words is an endeavor both tricky and notoriously suspect, for we can either seek to avoid contamination of the subject matter by creating a separate and distinct language beyond the language we are thinking about, or we can allow some transparency in our philosophizing by which our philosophy takes on the quality of a demonstration or instance of what it is talking about.

(Michael Heim:Electric Language; a philosophical study of word-processing.)

What implications do the application of digital media have for the area of language? The phenomenon that is labeled language encompasses many features. In order to facilitate my meanderings through the topic of language and digital media I have to define the specific space within which my wanderings will take place.
From my perspective as a graphic designer, I have an interest in the graphic representation of language, literally the characters out of which words are built and the structuring of these words so as to communicate information in the most effective and at the same time appealing, accessible way. Language perceived also as, letters, symbols, notation, or type. Language as text and typography. Navigation through bodies of text, structuring of information/knowledge, language as interface.
From my perspective of being brought up in a bilingual [English/Dutch] environment, a certain sensitivity to the origins, logic and implications of language in relation to cultural identity has evolved naturally.
Language in a physiological sense emanates, at one end of the process, from the human vocal tract, where it materializes in the form of minute but individual soundbytes [phonemes] which, when bound together by specific conventions, rules, rhythms and pitch, form speech. Typorality is a term that I coined in an attempt to describe my experimental work of the last year. It is the merging of the words typography, typing and orality. In the work itself, these three notions come together in a concrete form. Typography is the representation of language through letters and layout, typing refers to the input of text using a keyboard, and orality refers to language as spoken sound.
Digital media can give language life beyond the finality and finiteness of a printed text or the temporal /fleeting quality of speech. Language can now be manipulated, stored, edited, animated and generated. It can move around in a three-dimensional space and be connected to other sources of information both visual and aural.This has consequences for how writers write, how readers read, and how an audience listens, perceives and speaks. Important for me also is that it has consequences for how language could be presented in a formalistic sense from the point of view of a graphic/information designer.
It is my intention to address these consequences in the following text.

Digital media and language
It is not that we pay more attention to the medium in which things are said. Instead what is said comes to be said under different conditions, in a new element.

(Michael Heim:Electric Language; a philosophical study of word-processing.)

The development of orality and literacy throughout history can serve as an example of how a medium can influence the usage and form of language. And how this, in turn, influences the evolution and structure of human thought.
In oral cultures the form of language, specifically of language communicating information from one person to another was partially determined by a need to create a structure that would facilitate the reproduction of an idea through spoken language. There being no written record in such cultures, language was intimately entwined with memory. For this purpose certain repetitive patterns evolved whereby formulaic phrases, metrical regularity and cyclical composition patterns served to encapsulate and preserve information between generations. With the emergence of literacy there was no longer such a need for this formulaic approach to language. It could be recorded, and later with the development of printing technology easily reproduced, distributed and stored. Memory was no longer the major shaper of language and a stage/space came into being where communication could take on more creative features because one was no longer restricted to the relatively rigid phrasing that was required for oral communication.

As transmitters of information, each new medium builds upon and extends the previous media: literacy builds upon oral communication; typography absorbs both the voice and the skills of literacy; electronic media assimilate or depend upon the oral delivery of usually literacy-based texts or typographic scripts as well as upon a general public familiar with printed material available in the press, magazines and books.

(Michael Heim:Electric Language; a philosophical study of word-processing.)

The transition from orality to literacy has had profound consequences for the development of culture, but this issue lies outside the focus of this text. The influence of digital media on language will be more specifically discussed in the following subtexts.

Digital media and the act of reading
A typical text*:a sequence of letters and spaces conform to orthographic, syntactic and semantic constraints of written language. The average reader begins at the top left-hand corner of the page and reads each line from left to right. The readers eye movements across are not continuous but occur in a series of short jumps - saccades. The fixation time between saccades is approximately 10 times longer than the saccade itself. Initial processing of the visual stimulus must occur during fixation time. During an eye fixation, the light pattern reflected from letters is transduced by the visual receptors and a process detects and transmits visual features to preperceptual visual storage. The primary recognition process attempts to transform the isolated visual features in storage into a sequence of letters and spaces in synthesized visual memory. The secondary recognition process transforms the synthesized visual precept into meaningful form in generated abstract memory. It closes off the string of letters into a word, It makes this transformation by matching strings of letters to a lexicon that is stored in long-term memory. Assumption Orthographic structure influences perceptual recognition, and facilitates
processing from a perceptual to a conceptual level.
*Based on English

(excerpt from "Letter and Word Perception".Massaro, Taylor. Venezky a/o.)

The act of reading has had changing cultural and practical significance throughout the ages. Within oral culture obviously it was not even an issue. When literacy began to develop it was common for the written word to be read aloud. Not only to communicate information to the illiterate. But also as a mnemonic tool to memorize. As printing technology widely distributed literacy, the written word was internalized. It took quite a time before people were even able to read silently but eventually reading did become a solitary act.

The emergence of electronic media has meant a renewed combination of aural and visual media. The newsbroadcaster on television is reading aloud to the viewer. The text he reproduces as speech is text-based and transformed into speech with the help of an autocue. Programs on television using language not familiar to the local viewer use subtitles. So the viewer hears language and simultaneously is reading an interpretation of that language into their own. The solitary act of reading is perpetuated in the literal sense, because in principle the viewer can choose to sit alone while watching television. The fact that the same program is being transmitted to a large number of locations simultaneously makes the experience at the same time a collective one. Computer technology has acquired features that allow written and spoken language to go yet further. Now it is possible that a reader of digital texts can have these texts 'spoken' by the computer.
It has become increasingly apparent, that reading digital texts from a computer screen is not an ideal situation. The luminescence of the monitor, and its resolution which is nowhere near as sharp as the printed page make for very exhausting reading. The navigation through digital text also requires a different approach by the reader. Turning a page, flipping back and forth and skimming through a book of a hundred pages is clearly not how the reader can access information in a digital text. To get an overview of a complete digital text there are no physical [the thickness of a book] and visual/spatial [left and right page] anchors. Recent developments are however leading to a possible improvement regarding this lack of physicality in digital texts. At MIT a research group led by Joe Jacobson is working on the electronic book. This book makes use of electronic ink, which works as a conductor of data. The idea is to use this ink on paper, thus creating 'intelligent' paper. In theory it will be possible to connect this book, with its' intelligent pages, to libraries and then download complete books. Apart from being able to collect and store vast amounts of books in this way, a new dimension will be that any type of data can be downloaded and collected in this electronic book. So moving images and sound could find their way into a medium that was formerly limited to text and static images.

Reading hypertext
With the emergence of hypertextual tools the attitude of the reader regarding how to read the text
has changed. Navigation through the book, as we have known it for the last centuries, is clear to everybody. It holds no mystery. This is something that has yet to be achieved in electronic texts. There are no standard rules on how to move through such texts, it is difficult to get a complete overview on the whole body of text and writers therefore have to try and create interfaces that are "reader-friendly".
Once a reader has managed to find the key for entering the text he finds that he has a much more active and intrusive role then would be possible in a printed medium. He can choose his way through the text and read the same narrative in a variety of ways, which would mean that the writer has less control over how the text is interpreted.
This freedom of choice can form an obstacle for the reader to focus on a specific sequence of text, the temptation to take a peek at other possible connections is too great, and ultimately the main idea of the narrative gets lost.

Digital media and the act of writing
But are not all symbols arbitrary or stipulated? Or are symbols merely a part of the equipment of thought instead of belonging to the essence of thought? Is not natural language itself a tool of the mind instead of an essential component of thinking? How could word-processing technology affect thinking since word processing deals merely with the symbols of thought and not with the substance of thought itself?

(Michael Heim:Electric Language; a philosophical study of word-processing.)

The word processor is erasing literature

(Gore Vidal)

The emergence of new writing technologies through such phenomena as the word processor, electronic mail, chat software, and hypertext programs such as Storyspace is bound to have an impact on the use and formulation of language as text. It can be said of any writing technology, in fact most technologies, that when they are new many people are resistant, skeptical and even hostile towards them. Before writing came into existence, language could find its expression only through oral channels. It became through writing an externalized form of expression, which was considered by Plato to "be inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. (...) writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. (...) a written text is unresponsive. (...) Writing is passive, the written text cannot defend itself unlike the spoken word."
Much of this criticism is now applied to computers. There are those who feel that the computer is an intrusion into natural thought processes. This technology supposedly affects the writer in such a profound way that the forthcoming text is more a product of the software than of the writer. How realistic and justified is this view? What are the consequences of using the computer to compose your text? In fact is it the computer composing, or is the writer still in total and undisturbed control of the transposition of his thoughts and formulations into text? Does the language and the train of thought suffer, do ideas diminish in their profundity? In the following text I will attempt to address different ideas about the influx of digital tools in both the physical act of writing, the changes that may or may not occur in the creative process of writing, and the possible implications for language usage in general.

The creative process of writing
The sheer notion of the interface of writing no longer being a sheet of paper, but a virtual sheet of paper, 'paper' that can be forever reorganized, remapped, 'paper' that acquires its strings of characters through the use of the keyboard, 'paper' that is imbued not only with information in the shape of the familiar words on the screen, but also with hidden data of encoded information. This 'paper' that can literally be connected to a network of writings, writers and readers, must have consequences for the use of language in writing, for the stream of thoughts preceding the actual recording in textual form….
Formulation in word processing is more immediate, resulting in sets of symbols that are less developed on the basis of sequential organization. With the word processor, getting started is less of a problem. Starting with random sentences and phrases, one finds it easy to begin writing, (...) the writer can begin anywhere in a text, then effortlessly reorganize and restructure (...) Immediacy reduces the terror of writing, since the screen can continually be revised and played with to reduce the frozen self that appears on paper.

(Michael Heim:Electric Language; a philosophical study of word-processing.)

Horror vacuii most definitely finds its parallel in a screen generated text: I would compare the history of deletions and backspaces that my word processor can recall to that classic wastepaper basket filled with rejected morsels of text tightly crumpled into frustrated balls of paper.

A conversation with a friend who has a wordprocessor since 1994, and purchased it specifically because she had embarked on a mission to write a biography about her grandfather, resulted in an exposé of her attitude towards this tool. She also writes poetry, and is a pianist, so tapping keys is not alien to her. I was curious why for instance she would never consider using this machine to write her poetry. And, knowing her technophobe attitudes, wanted to hear how she experiences the wordprocessor.
"Ik heb dat ding in '94 gekocht, en pas in 1996 ben ik er iets mee gaan proberen. Het heeft 2 jaar mooi staan wezen omdat ik er niets mee durfde. Ik moest er echt helemaal naartoe groeien. Ik ben echt iemand die met de hand schrijft, met een gouden vulpen, en dan veel versies, door doorkrassen veel opnieuw, en ja natuurlijk is dat allemaal makkelijker als je eenmaal zo een computer kan gebruiken om te corrigeren, maar dan ben je ook meteen het contact kwijt met je vorige versie. Ik ben eigenlijk wat dit boek betreft, noodgedwongen om de computer te gebruiken. Ik had enorme stukken met de handgeschreven, die ben ik dan op de computer gaan uittikken en weer in diverse sessies gaan corrigeren. Maar ik ben heel lang alles eerst met de hand blijven doen, toen de tijd begon te dringen dacht ik, ik ga het gewoon proberen meteen op het scherm, om direct op het scherm te schrijven. Dat werd een crisis want
ik kon helemaal niet denken, ik kon geen zin maken als ik met dat scherm voor mijn kop zat. Op een gegeven moment ging dat dan toch komen, dus op het ogenblik breng ik dat dan toch wel op om direct op het scherm te schrijven, te creëren. Maar ik was daar altijd een tegenstander van.Ik vind het wat gestresster om voor het scherm mijn gedachten te formuleren dan voor een blad papier. Ik heb het gevoel dat het dan meteen goed moet zijn. De voordelen van 'delete', 'copy' en 'paste' worden weer teniet gedaan doordat je geen kijk meer hebt op het voorafgaande. Als je wit papier voor je hebt met veel doorhalingen en krassen, met aantekeningen aan de zijkanten, dan houd je toch meer voeling met je hele gedachtengang. Dat vind ik erg prettig en belangrijk, zéker met poëzie. Een gedicht schrijven, dat doe ik met de hand, dat kan ik niet anders. Dat is zo op de vierkante millimeter werken, dat vereist een zeer direct contact met je gedachtengang."

Digital writing supplants the framework of the book: it replaces the craftsman’s care for resistant materials with automated manipulation; deflects attention from personal expression to the more general logic of algorithmic procedures; shifts the steadiness of the contemplative formulation of ideas into an overabundance of dynamic possibilities; and turns the private solitude of reflective reading and writing into a public network where the personal symbolic framework needed for original authorship is threatened by linkage with the total textuality of human expressions.

(Michael Heim:Electric Language; a philosophical study of word-processing.)

Writing within hypertextual environments
Not only do the new writing technologies possibly affect the stream of thoughts leading up to the final text, but also new signs and symbols make their entrance that have an impact on the expression of the text itself. When using a hypertextual writing tool, writing also becomes a spatial activity. Space is manipulated while writing, the writer can choose to position a text in specific ways that are directly related to the possibilities that electronic writing tools offer. Distinctive bundles of text can be layered in other than strictly linear ways. Nodes, which can be seen as containers of information, are connected to each other by links. Links can be distinguished within a text for instance by being underlined, or having a different colour, they can also take on the form of a button or an icon.
Sounds can be used to direct the reader through the body of text. These sounds can be speechsounds, but they could also be more abstract sounds that function as acoustic pictograms. With relative ease images, both static and animated, can be inserted in a text. In contrast to printed text, an electronically generated and displayed text has no element of permanence.

Electronic mail
The type of writing that takes place on the net is interactional and very context dependent. Written statements now have the fluidity of open conversation.

(Neil Corcoran)

Writing using email has led to a different form and approach to correspondence than through mail as we knew it. Often email is referred to as a kind of hybrid of written and spoken language. The term electronic mail implies that letter writing is its basis. However once one has become accustomed to the application of email to exchange messages, certain formal rules that apply to letter writing as we know it seem obsolete. The more a person becomes accustomed to the technology used for email, the more the tone/register used grows closer to a form of conversation rather than a letter. The suggestion of real-time communication contributes to this. The mere fact that email gives a suggestion of immediacy seems to give rise to a more informal, conversational tone. The receiver of the message can in theory send an immediate response that travels through the cable of the network at a significantly faster rate than a letter passing through the postal system would. This gives license to write very brief ‘communiqués’. Much like a telephone conversation. So why use email?
One very personal motive is that it enables me to have contact without having to get involved in a lengthy phone conversation. I can have very brief thoughts and ideas that would not merit a letter, a card or a phonecall but are easily communicated through email. Establishing contact with complete strangers somehow also seems quite acceptable when using email. It is less invasive than a phonecall, but somehow more direct/effective than a letter. That seems mostly due to the possibility of replying by basically clicking the 'send' button, not having to write an eloborate response but being allowed to keep the text extremely brief, literally not having to search for an envelope and walk to a letterbox to post the reply. Frequently people omit capital letters, apostrophes, and other punctuation when composing an email. This does not evolve from conviction but is most likely a direct result of not being as fluent with the keys of the keyboard as with a pen. If the usage of email continues to expand and normalize, I could imagine that this disregard for punctuation could permanently affect written language. Email is connected to a network of messages and can be retrieved as a thread of texts that are responses to responses, and which no longer read only as a linear text, but become an almost (hyper)textual weave of ideas, questions, answers opinions and so forth. Thus as a medium it lends itself to the unfolding of dialogue in written form. And unlike phone conversations the dialogue is recorded as text and can be edited and reedited so that the latest recipient in the thread has the most updated version.

Europanto
A direct effect of the growth of global communications, and therefore also of email, on the structure, syntax and lexicon of a language can be found in the phenomenon which has been coined as 'europanto' by Diego Marani, an Italian interpreter working at the Europarlement. It describes a merging of different languages, with English as the backbone. Marani refers to it not as a complete language, but as a linguistic code of conduct. It has evolved through the necessity to communicate in international gatherings with others whose native tongue is different from your own. The amount of English speakers for whom it is their second-tongue far outnumber English native speakers. To enable these non-native speakers to have a richer communication than the very basic notions they could exchange if limited to using English only, words, syntax and grammar can be borrowed and inserted from their own languages. The result is a hybrid language, not unlike pidgin, which people from diverse language backgrounds are able to comprehend.

C'est quoi
"Que would happen if, wenn Du open your computero, finde eine message in esta lingua? No est Englando, no est Germano, no est Espano, no est Franzo, no est keine known lingua aber Du understande! Wat happen zo! Habe your computero eine virus catched? Habe Du sudden BSE gedeveloped? No, Du esse lezendo la neue europese lingua: de Europanto! Europanto ist uno melangio van de meer importantes Europese linguas mit also eine poquito van andere europese linguas, sommige Latinus, sommige old grec."

The accessibility of people to people all over the world using the Internet, the basic fact that these are people from a multitude of language origins, and that most are exposed through the global communications expansion to different languages, could lead to a broad acceptance of this multilingual language.
As yet it seems to be considered as tongue-in-cheek, leading to very entertaining columns by Marani, and a large following of enthusiasts who regularly make contributions written in Europanto that can be found on the internet.

Cyber-English
Having encountered upon the article titled "Resisting Cyber-English", it is interesting to take note of this more critical approach to the use of English on the Internet in relation to quality and equality within multilingual and international communications. "(…) the net’s overwhelming reliance on the English language constitutes its greatest barrier to electronic participation. This fairly obvious truism regarding the mismatch between the net’s lingua franca and the overwhelmingly non-anglophone world has been so widely overlooked as to become a comment in it’s own right on a willful mass blindness that characterizes cyber-English culture. After all, we all speak English, so what’s the problem here?" Unlike Marian, the writer of this article, Joe Lockard, does not as easily accept the primacy of English within Internet and other global communications The tone and focus of this text is more directed towards the political consequences of a language that is developed and promoted within the boundaries of cyberspace, and therefore merits some attention. It is an interesting and thought provoking contrast to the rather amusing but seemingly less critical ideas resulting in Europanto. "(…) we all function in a technological development where a fully intelligible and idiomatic command of standard English has emerged as the authorization for a global opinion(…)". Commenting on the unfair advantage of native-English speakers, and the discrimination of those who are unable to express their opinions as fluently in English, Lockard remarks the following in reaction to a message posted online by an Italian-speaker: "This passage of cyber-Neapolitan in English does not wait for the authorizations of proper syntax; it asserts an expressive immanence that relies on a power within it’s originating language rather than conforming to net language norms. The speaker controls his cyber-English well, even though he speaks English poorly."
There being no acceptable substitute as yet, it is not likely that the primacy of English in cyberspace is going to be usurped soon. It seems important however to be aware of the influence that cyber-English has, and to keep eyes and ears open for methods and systems, software and other tools (such as automatic translation software) that might enable a more open and fluent exchange of ideas amongst those that are not masters of the English language, but are totally apt at their own.

Digital media and the act of speech
Thanks to the telephone, the gramophone and the radio we have become accustomed to hearing speech in the absence of the speaker.

(Roman Jakobson, Six essays on sound and meaning)

In the chapter on digital media and the act of reading the notion of speaking computers was briefly mentioned. Disembodied speech communication, as referred to in the quote above, is a type of orality that we have become accustomed to. What is less normalized or known, although it is rapidly invading the daily life of many, is the synthetic voice. The development of artificial speech started out with imitative technologies whereby often the human vocal tract was rebuilt and manipulated in such a way so as to produce speechlike sounds, as early as 1778 Wolfgang von Kempelen built an artificial voice using bellows, a flap of leather and a box. There have been a few examples of combining the keyboard with speechsounds: Abbé Mical produced, in 1783, his Têtes Parlantes whereby a keyboard interface was introduced to operate the speechlike sounds. This speechmachine became, through the ease of its manipulation, a musical instrument.
At the 1939 World's Fair a machine called a Voder (Voice Operated Demonstrator) was shown. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal cords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electronically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loudspeaker, producing English-language using 50 phonemes. The twentieth century has seen a completely different approach to the generation of these sounds, digital technology calculates the shapes of sound signals, (Jakobson speaks of the acoustic image) and makes them audible using loudspeakers. A new medium has made it’s entrance, language has acquired a sound that is independent of the body, a sound that emanates from syntax, phonemes and from the linguistic system. Now speech synthesis systems are becoming extremely complex and precise. Applications for such voices are found, for instance in the speaking computers on telephone lines of diverse companies, the computer on the other end recognizes your spoken language and responds with it’s synthetic voice. What effects this has on language usage in general I can not hazard to guess, what is clear however is that when a person is speaking to this computer voice, their own speech has to adjust to the restrictions of the mechanic ear.
So when eavesdropping on such a ‘conversation’ I’m struck by the absurdity and meagerness of the language used, after all one has to articulate clearly (but not too clearly), the mechanical voice is connected to a specific field of information and can only reply with a set series of responses, there is no room for improvisation, quirkiness and spontaneity in this discourse. It becomes a monosyllabic monologue, with a ‘speaking’ and ‘listening’ machine. It is not dissimilar to speaking with one who does not speak your native tongue well; vocabulary and syntax are severely limited.
My own Macintosh computer has in its system 22 different synthetic voices that I can choose to turn on or off. In this way I can enable certain text documents to be read out loud by whichever voice I have chosen, ranging from the bland and boring "Agnes" to spacey and droidlike "Zarvox". Or if I have turned the Talking Alerts on, the computer will speak the warnings and error messages that I would otherwise only read in the dialogue boxes on the screen. If the right software is installed it becomes possible to give spoken commands to the computer rather than clicking the mouse.
I question the necessity of this feature, as yet the computer has problems understanding what you say so it’s all rather tedious to actually make use of. It has led, however, to an intriguing and amazingly quite beautiful Simple Text soundpiece in the corridors of our former school building, based on every one typing the digit "7" 1500 times in a SimpleText programme, choosing one of the system voices and then simultaneously having 10 computers, in spaces coming out into the same corridor, reading this text aloud. What resulted was a mesmerizing mantra. Not very functional, not at all serious, but surprisingly beautiful.

TYPORALITY continued
"With a little practice and agility, we will be able to speak with the fingers as with the tongue, and we will be able to give the language of the heads the speed, calm, and in short all the qualities that a language can possess which is not animated by passions.

(Comment from a contemporary of Abbé Mical about Têtes Parlantes)

Only minimal phonic means are required in order to express and communicate a wealth of conceptual, emotive and esthetic content.

(Roman Jakobson, Six essays on sound and meaning)

The project that I have been working on in the months preceding my graduation at Media-GN has absorbed some of the ideas and notions, and some of the features of language in relation to digital media that I have discussed in this thesis. I do not look upon this work as a completed
project, but more as an investigation, an exploratory model for a different application/usage of language tools (more specifically spoken language).
Main elements for TYPORALITY are the following:
Navigation through, and input for this work all take place using the keyboard. The output consists of speechsounds whose origins lie in speech-synthesis. I have taken sounds from five different speech synthesizers each representing a different language: French, German, Italian, Spanish and English. Further output in TYPORALITY is a series of abstract animations, as opposed to the familiar characters of language, resulting from the sequence that has been typed by the user. Each key of the keyboard is connected to an image and one or more sounds. There is no final aim that I have defined for this piece. It incorporates notions on language as an abstract, and purely formal phenomenon. It also is an indulgement of my fascination toward speech. The reason for using five different language sounds is that I became aware, especially once becoming acqainted with speech synthesis as a language technology, how subtly languages differ from one another on a speech level. When researching the topic of phonetics, I learned that all languages basically consist of up to approximately 60-70 phonemes. (speechsounds, utterances,: any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language) The same phonemes. So English speech uses the same phonemes as for instance French. Which raises the question why do these languages sound so different? I then learned that what distinguishes one language from the other are diphones. Diphones are the transition from one phoneme to the other, and in diphones lie that specific characteristic languagesound that I relate to each specific language. These diphones are what form the speechsounds emanating from speechsynthesis systems.
I am intrigued by these minute yet significant soundbytes, and how it seems possible to discern between different languages even within tiny fragments of sound.
In TYPORALITY I am in the process of creating/designing a novel type of orality, whereby the user/writer 'speaks' through using the keys. What emerges is something that is not immediately recognizable as speech but does find its origins there within. The following quote from phonologist Roman Jakobson illustrates for me what could evolve from such a model:

(...) This process opens up many possibilities for phonetic experimentation. A knowledge of the visual representation of each sound makes it possible to directly draw the speech and then to transform it via film into an audible phenomenon.
It is thereby made possible to hear speech that has never been uttered by anyone. And there is no need to be limited to slavishly imitating sounds that we already know. In drawing the sounds one can progressively alter and distort their visual equivalents so as to achieve previously unfamiliar acoustic effects.

(Roman Jakobson, Six essays on sound and meaning)

So when somebody is using the keyboard that I prepared, to type a text, they can create utterances, or sequences of sounds that may be physically impossible for the human voice to reproduce. What emerges from this model as yet has no semantic qualities; I have juxtaposed the five languages used in such a way that I try to make the user/listener aware of these subtle distinctions between the sounds of different languages. According to which part of the model you are in, the distinctive languages used become more merged with one another, ultimately resulting in a hybrid 'language'.
One could very loosely make associations with the theme of the Tower of Babel in as much that there is a 'scattering of tongues' (in this case five), that can slowly evolve into one composite language. This is actually more an inverted tower, the original collapsed due to highfalutin' subjects attempting to reach the heavens whereby their one tongue was splintered into many, making communication amongst one another inefficient to say the least.

For a perfect universal language to be formed, is that my ideal?
No. I don't believe that such a thing is ever going to be possible. The Europanto mentioned earlier appeals to me as a more real and natural Babbelesque phenomenon, related to a significant increase of interlingual communication. I could imagine the creation, or coming into being, of a language that incorporates the best of any other language. A language that allows for a fluent, fluid mixture of (already existent) words coming from diverse linguistic backgrounds.
Words from different languages that each seems to be the most fitting, the best word for the job. Words that label notions or ideas in a manner that words in another language could not, words that, if translated, lose too much in the interpretation. This hybrid language is not something that necessarily has to be artificially created, it emerges naturally, sprouting from the fertile ground of international communication. It can evolve slowly, steadily within the framework of the existing predominant language of the native speaker. It differs from a constructed language in as much that it is not contrived and therefore more likely to find its way into regular usage. And, as opposed to pidgin tongues, this language does not reduce the level of communication back to basics. This colourful, expressive and rich new composite language, I believe, is already evolving on a small scale within certain circles. The globalization of communications, the exposure of the many, not only to written language, but also to the sound and intonation of other languages than their own, create a situation in which it becomes easier to incorporate alien words within ones own language. Imagine that this was to become an accepted practice. Not for all language communication but within specific situations where the exchange of ideas takes place amongst an interlingual group. This would not be a universal language in the sense of the language that was before the fall of the Tower of Babel, but it would be a language that offers opportunities for a fair exchange of ideas and notions amongst people whose native tongues are of diverse origin.

Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing (a human language) which is better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording speech.

(Vannevar Bush, As we may Think)

Interesting thoughts, but getting back to TYPORALITY...
At the same time I did not want to use the familiar characters of the Roman alphabet. I chose abstract, and for the moment fairly arbitrary, shapes to represent the different keys, characters and language sounds. This idea stems partly from experiences I've had while travelling in countries whose written language has different symbols than my own. (For instance Hebrew.) Not being able to decipher the text, but being aware through the context that it IS text, I was intrigued by the fact that I could appreciate these symbols purely as form and composition. If I had been able to read these characters and possibly be disturbed or distracted by the meaning, I would have experienced them in a completely different way.
The symbols that I am using in this model are, as I mentioned earlier, rather arbitrary and momentarily serve the purpose of giving an impression of the effect of using other visual feedback than letters.

As to how this model could find an application, I have several tentative ideas. None of them as yet serve any practical purpose. One option is that two computers would be connected, like the classic two cans on a rope, whereby two people could enter into a ‘dialogue’, communicating with speechsounds instead of letters. The resulting 'conversation’ would take on the form of a duet more than of an exchange of text. There would be the opportunity to send each other messages that would be represented as animated speechcompositions, and that could be decoded back into the original typed characters. These animated messages could be used as attachments to email messages, enabling a very different kind of correspondence. Sending each other little ditties instead of letters.
With more technical expertise at my disposal I would, in the future, be able to fine-tune the effects of the keys to the extent that the speed and pressure of the keys pressed could be measured and taken into account when the message is played back. I would hope that concrete applications for TYPORALITY will make themselves visible as I continue to experiment and play...
The status of this project, as I complete the 2 years at Media-GN, will be an open ended one.

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SOME OF THE TEXTS READ, GLANCED AT, OR QUOTED FROM:


BOOKS
After Babel. George Steiner
The Book of Babel. Nigel Lewis
Six essays on Sound and Meaning. Roman Jakobson
Electric Language; a philosophical study
of word-processing. Michael Heim
Orality and Literacy. Walter Ong
The search for the perfect Language. Umberto Eco
Language and creative Illusion. Walter Nash

ARTICLES
Digital Ink (Charles Platt) Wired 5/5/7

The Last Book (J.Jacobson a/o.) IBM Systems Journal 26/03/97

Visual Prose Eye 30/98 p.64-71

Virtual Voices. (Remko Scha) Institute of Artificial Art, Amsterdam
(http://www2.netcetera.nl/~iaaa/virtual.html)

Resisting Cyber-English (Joe Lockard) Bad Subjects.
Issue # 24 Issue # 24, February 1996 Political Education for Everyday Life
(http://eserver.org/bs/24/lockard.html)

Writing oneself in cyberspace (Daniel Chandler)
(http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/homepgid.html#B)

Montaigne and the Word Processor (Daniel Chandler)
(http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/montword.html)

Europanto. From productive process to language.
Or how one can cause international English to implode. (Diego Marani)

Europanto, a linguistic jazz aimed at
destroying English. (Bruno Giussani) New York Times, 24/03/1998

Gaps, maps and perception: what hypertext readers (don’t) do.
(J. Yellowlees Douglas)
(http://noel.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/douglas_p3.html)

What happens to writing when texts in a "world on paper" are replaced by messages in virtual space? (Finn Bostad)
(http://www.hf.unit.no/anv/www.pages/Finn/Finn.html)

Wordperfect: literacy and electronic writing. (Claire Beegan)
(http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/beegan/wordperf1.htm)