The limits of our language are the limits of our technology (1)
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•216 views
The document discusses the evolution of comics and their language as the medium transitions to digital formats and the web. It examines Scott McCloud's concept of "The Infinite Canvas" which proposed removing restrictions of page layouts and allowing fluid layouts. However, this concept has limitations and challenges in implementation on the web. Webcomics artists have experimented with adaptations of this concept by zooming in and out of pages, and creating nonlinear narrative experiences through scrolling. The language and technologies of the digital world are constantly changing, posing challenges for preserving and maintaining digital works over time.
Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Similar to The limits of our language are the limits of our technology (1)
Similar to The limits of our language are the limits of our technology (1) (10)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
The limits of our language are the limits of our technology (1)
- 2. The Limits of our Language are the Limits of our Technology Balancing the evolution of literature with that of the Web
- 5. Hybrid
- 6. Mutant
- 7. Atavism
- 8. Evolution
- 11. The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering; Frederic W. Goudy (1918)
- 12. Why webcomics
- 13. Multimodal medium For over a hundred year comics have been using image, text, color, principles from film, architecture, design and photography. “TheLastTrolley”(March24,1946), scriptbyWillEisner,artbyBobPalmer
- 16. Comic book theoretician Comic book author Web and digital media futurist Scott McCloud “Scott McCloud didn't write Understanding Comics to help web designers, but the book has proved inspirational to designers of multimedia CDs, web sites, and games. Dave Sims
- 18. Faces the same challenges As with literature, comics is a medium defined by print, its language is shaped by print and by the analog world. Webcomics don’t appear out of the digital world, they must be laboured into it, but they might be: “a durable mutation that will continue to survive and thrive into the new century Scott McCloud
- 22. The canon of digital literature must constantly face up to the canonical technology The Web has a language of its own and it is ever changing
- 23. The need to maintain a digital record “The digital work is vulnerable. The preservation of its existence in cyberspace requires continuous precautions, so that its programming and electronic format do not end up obsolete and illegible with the renovation of support systems, and so that it does not vanish from its servers for lack of maintenance or payment of fees. Domenico Chiappe
- 24. The language of the Web changes “Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story is literally unreadable, languishing in antiquated software and hardware formats inaccessible to the contemporary reader Adam Hammond
- 25. The meta-language of the Web changes
- 29. A webpage might look like a page... “For readers who do not themselves program in computational media, the temptation of reading the screen as a page is especially seductive. N. Katherine Hayles
- 30. ...but it’s not
- 31. We would navigate a site
- 32. Now we scroll through a feed
- 33. “I think the online comics’ greatest promise is the chance to break out of the page. But if we don’t merely want to trade our old flat rectangular prison for a new one, then we need to treat the screen as a windows and for now that means asking the readers to scroll. Scott McCloud
- 35. The trouble with The Infinite Canvas Perils of unexamined theory
- 36. More than scroll ● New kind of sequencing ● New ways to explore the spatial relationship between panels
- 37. Some problems ● There are limits in the original formulation ● Gary Groth addressed them in McCloud Cuckoo- Land: Un-Reinventing Comics
- 41. Fixation on clarity ● The fear of ambiguity limits the potential ScottMcCloud, Ican’tstopthinking!!#1
- 42. False lead? ”This sounds like nothing less than a desperate attempt to wed a form and a technology that aren't particularly suited to each other Gary Groth
- 43. Real world to the rescue ● Daniel Merlin Goodbrey applied McCloud’s ideas to “architecturally mediated hypercomics” ● More in-depth discussion about them in Images In Space - The Challenges Of Architectural Spatiality In Comics
- 44. “Spatial relationship between panels influence the reader's interpretation of the passage of time. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
- 45. “Blind corners hide surprises for the reader. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
- 46. “Shifts the narrative from being a thread to follow through the comic to be being emergent from the space of the exhibit itself Jaymes Nichols
- 52. Retrofitting The Infinite Canvas on the Web
- 55. Flap design
- 73. “Had reformatted the comic, zoomed in and zoomed out of the original print version, and created a reading experience that felt like it went on for pages and pages Frank Santoro
- 83. Ambivalence to digital authorship? Scott McCloud Dash Shaw Zack Soto Emily Carroll
- 84. Potential new evolutions of The Infinite Canvas
- 87. Make a choice without knowing
- 88. Remake the act of re-reading
- 89. Conclusion
Editor's Notes
- I see an implicit assumption made by scholars of electronic literature that the digital technology is somehow complete or tends to a fixed point we know of. Which means that studying e-lit means finding the solutions to bridge the gap between the two domains. I will use webcomics to show that this is not the case and that achieving a breakthrough in electronic literature is actually prdated by a long process of canon building and inquiry into what new means of expression are afforded or denied by the shifting state of the web.
- There is a difference between a mutant and a hybrid, although popular culture makes great efforts to convince us of the contrary.
- A hybrid is the offspring of two different, yet similar enough species. The mule is a hybrid between a donkey and a horse, for example. Usually, hybrids are enhanced individuals, larger and stronger than either of their parents, yet usually they are sterile. They cannot produce offspring. No hybrid will sire a new species.
- On the other hand, a mutant is an individual who by chance or by the actions of a mutagen agent suffers a change in the structure of its DNA. It isn’t always inheritable. It isn’t always noticeable or impressive.
- Rarely a mutation is useful. Sometimes they can even be atavistic, bringing back phenotypical characteristic lost during the evolutionary process for good reason.
- But, when it happens to be useful, it will be passed down to the offspring. After a point, sufficient mutations will accumulate in a population that they’ll become something new, something better suited for a new environment or for surviving a sudden change in their existing one. In evolutionary terms we would call this phenomena speciation and it takes many generations.
- In literary terms, we would call this process the establishing of a literary canon. This, as well happens over many generations. The difference is that in literature, once a mutation is discovered and isolated it can much more quickly accelerate the process, producing its own genre or new canan.
- It is then apt that we are looking into mutant and not hybrid literature. I don’t think we have much interest observing just one work, no matter how astonishing its individual merits are, if what it achieves isn’t conducive to a new kind of language: one that can be shared by others and used to explore the digital environment in ways off bounds to “unmutated” literature.
- Uncovering that new radical language is outside the scope of this presentation. What I intend to do, instead, is to offer a couple of new tools of investigation and some insights into the technology behind electronic literature.
- I posit that the comic book medium possesses a number of unique qualities making it illuminating in the study of digital literature.
- Electronic literature is often considered to be much more than text, that it taps into more than just literary tradition, employing means and practices from pictorial or audio-visual mediums.
- More than the shallow fact the comics has both type and image, this means digital literature steps into areas already occupied and explored by comics such as the representation of time through space
- or the ways in which the meaning of the written message can be altered by the shape, color and texture of the writing itself. Comics already have a mature understanding of these principles and are ready to uncover what new forms they’re afforded by the digital world.
- There are theoretical communalities between webcomics and the modern web itself as they share a guiding hand in the form of Scott McCloud. Scott McCloud not only authored Understanding Comics, one of the most popular, if faulty, works of comics theory, but also Reinventing Comics, which was one of the first scholarly works looking at how the Web might impact comic books as a medium, both commercially and artistically. At the same time, when talking about web design he is mentioned in the same breath as Lynda Weinman or Donald Norman.
- When launching Chrome, Google asked him to create a comic explaining the technology behind the new browser. He’s habitually mentioned by designers in tutorials, lists of recommended literature, as a general source of inspiration and invited to speak at technology events.
- As opposed to video games, which is a digital native medium for whom sports and tabletop games are distant ancestors, webcomics are the result of a print medium facing the digital landscape and adapting to it, mutating with it. While other digital media are a tabula rasa, digital literature, counting webcomics among it, faces additional challenges in its study since they carry on with them the language, the canon, the critical theories of its pre-digital form. The scholar’s work is doubled because she not only must ask herself if a work is revolutionary, but also what kind of literature it pushed forward. Webcomics might be, as Scott McCloud says, ”a durable mutation that will continue to survive and thrive into the new century”, but in order make such a statement with certainty we must establish a canon of webcomics, we must find a point wherefrom webcomics don’t mutate from comics, don’t simply apply the language of comics on the web, but rather mutate from other webcomics.
- The task at hand for authors remains to establish a contiguous body of works that remain in relation with the web and one another, rather than to their print counterparts; and the task for critics, scholars and theoreticians is to filter what in an author’s approaches is genuine mutation, what is sterile hybridization, what is a necessary part of the artform and what is just baggage from the print world.
- Otherwise, instead of this
- We’ll be witnessing this
- These tasks are made difficult by the nature of the technology we work with. At it’s base, the Web is text and hyperlinks. While we could consider of sufficient importance the ability to fragment and link our writing, we must not forget that when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at CERN, he mostly wanted a system to bring into the digital domain ages old versions of hyperlinks such as footnotes, indexes and reference sections. And there are indeed many other novel lense through which the web allows us to see the world. But we must not mistake the new perspectives with the tools we use. The tools change.
- Domenico Chiappe in his essay Enveloping Literature and other Challenges to the Multimedia Author anticipates this when he says that “The digital work is vulnerable. The preservation of its existence in cyberspace requires continuous precautions, so that its programming and electronic format do not end up obsolete and illegible with the renovation of support systems, and so that it does not vanish from its servers for lack of maintenance or payment of fees.” In this he is completely right, but the solution that “the author should duplicate copies” and should assume the role of the librarian is incomplete.
- The work itself must be partially or even completely recreated using new technologies as they fall off use and support, then it must be redistributed as new systems and new informational infrastructure replace old ones. A work written in a proprietary program such as Storyspace and distributed on CDs must be updated as new operating systems fail to run the aging software and new machines cannot read from that particular format, if they even have CD-Drives. A work written as a Java Applet must have be updated as a Flash project, then as a HTML5 project making use of the <canvas> element and new iterations of JavaScript if it were to remain alive and readable constantly for the past decades. If not, they will become “literally unreadable, languishing in antiquated software and hardware formats inaccessible to the contemporary reader” as Adam Hammond notes that is the case with Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden.
- This unstable landscape even affects the author who wants to let her print work be shaped by the idioms of the electronic world. How can she retrofit the new languages of the Internet and the World Wide Web when staples of the medium are established, then disappear in much less than a generation? Moving from Dial-Up to to broadband cable or optic fibre had distinctive effects on the basic aesthetic marks of the Internet.
- For example, the loss of the handshake sound a modem made while establishing a connection
- or annoyances specific to slow-speed Internet such as the slow loading of an image on the screen, and its uncertainties.
- More substantial are the changes to the basic way we navigate the web itself.The way we interact with the page has changed: we no longer go through paginated lists of information because scrolling isn’t considered clunky anymore, but rather the norm. It might not appear as such at first, but this has a profound influence on the kind of literature available.
- N. Katherine Hayles argues that “[f]or readers who do not themselves program in computational media, the temptation of reading the screen as a page is especially seductive.”
- Especially since we as programmers and designers were indeed paginating our content, including almost skeuomorphic “Next Page” buttons in the right corner. But when scrolling through a webpage it reveals itself to be something else. As Scott McCloud argues, this allows for a shift in the conventions of the web and as such in its language.
- Navigating the web used to be similar to climbing a tree. One would start at the first page of a site or a forum, then go on through multiple layers usually barely containing anything, at last arriving at the fruit of information after many branching paths.
- Now this hierarchical and arborescent approach has been supplanted by the stream. We spend more time on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, scrolling through the timeline, taking a stop to read an article shared from an external site, then returning in the main lobby.
- McCloud, as well, saw a great shift made available by the scroll. “I think the online comics’ greatest promise is the chance to break out of the page. But if we don’t merely want to trade our old flat rectangular prison for a new one, then we need to treat the screen as a windows and for now that means asking the readers to scroll.
- For this, he coined the term The Infinite Canvas in his book Reinventing Comics
- Of course The Infinite Canvas is not just scrolling. It insists on a reconsideration of comics’ language, making it capable of producing new types of sequences by exploiting the spatial relationship between panels.
- For example he proposes that “[g]iven a pictorial shape to whole stories may provide a unifying identity” and remarks that he “was able to reflect the A-B. A-B-B rhyming structure and rhythm [...] through a zigzag panel arrangement”.
- It must be addressed that while his intuition proved strong his conclusions and rhetoric are somewhat dubious, as Gary Groth asses in his article “McCloud Cuckoo-Land: Un-Reinventing Comics, part 2”.
- McCloud arrived at the idea of The Infinite Canvas by looking at works of narrative art from the Antiquite such as Trajan’s Column and became entranced by the way they translated space into time. He retroactively saw them as “temporal maps”.
- As is the case with his sources of inspiration, the possible uses he proposes are mostly monumental in nature
- or shaped in such complex spatial configurations, that Groth cannot see any point to them other than “novelty and freakishness”.
- Moreso, McCloud remains fixated on clarity, linearity and storytelling, while shunning ambiguity, especially when the scales and arrangements he proposes seem to invite a degree of confusion and reader participation. His values are so much at odds with what he discovered that in order to make sense of his hypothetic ”giant comic holding forty thousand panels in a square matrix” he even introduces an atavistic trail between the panels, which few, webcomics picked up on.
- By this point we would be right in believing Groth when he concludes that “this sounds like nothing less than a desperate attempt to wed a form and a technology that aren't particularly suited to each other”, which is to say The Infinite Canvas has no practical application for the comics author.
- But the observations and intuitions that birthed this concept are salvaged and put into a new light by what Daniel Merlin Goodbrey calls architecturally mediated hypercomics, a species of gallery comics influenced by online means of communication in general and Scott McCloud’s writings in particular. He applies these principles in a couple of installations, PoCom and Black Hats in Hell. Black Hats in Hell especially is of interest since he described it and analysed it at length in his paper Images In Space - The Challenges Of Architectural Spatiality In Comics
- It is a gallery comic about two gunslingers caught in a cycle of violence both on earth and in the afterlife which makes use of The Framework Gallery’s layout not only to enhance the story by using the “spatial relationship between panels [to] influence the reader's interpretation of the passage of time”
- or to let “blind corners hide surprises for the reader or suggest a progression in time between the events depicted on the two joining walls”,
- but even, as Jayms Nichols noted “[shift] the narrative from being a thread to follow through the comic to be being emergent from the space of the exhibit itself”
- Using McCloud’s theoretical output Goodbrey shows how the digital environment can act as a mutagen to the off-screen artform creating a new species of site specific gallery comics. But his insight into creating Black Hats in Hell also illuminates why few scrolling webcomics look like those envisioned by McCloud and why the theory he created failed webcomics themselves, but worked wonderfully when applied to a physical space.
- McCloud saw The Infinite Canvas as a way to revert comics to what he thought was a purer version of the sequential art, subsequently subverted by print. It seems that when he shows us The Bayeux Tapestry scrolled through a computer screen, that is much less a metaphor and much more a literal approach he would have comics take.
- One of the applications he gives is telling in this sense: “[a] series of panels turned at right angles may keep the reader off-guards, never knowing what to expect around the next corner”. This we’ve seen in Goodbrey’s gallery comic and it requires a 3D space to function, while the screen remains flat.
- Also telling is the fact that he doesn’t consider the differences between how one would interact with Trajan’s Column (by circling it again and again) and how one interacts with the computer (typing, clicking, tapping, scrolling),
- then only mentions scrolling as a foundational way of interacting with webcomics in an illustrated essay created after the publication of Reinventing Comics. Which means that McCloud’s envisioned applications of his observations and research wasn’t wrong and that he, indeed taped into our new electronic environment to enrich and maybe even mutate the artform he remained stuck for the one hand in his own aesthetic misgivings and on the other in a view that mistakes electronic literature with, necessarily digitized literature.
- So we’ll keep in mind what Scott McCloud wrote, but we now have the added benefit of more than fifteen years of interaction between the web and comics.
- One of the earliest instances of scrolling comics on the web actually comes from Scans Daily a fan community started in 2003 whose activity centered on recontextualizing mainstream superhero comics through a female and queer lense. Readers would scan pages of comics that suggest queer relationships between otherwise canonical straight characters and in effect creating slash fiction by picking and choosing moments that would subvert the main narrative and give credence to their headcanon. From then it grew into a larger community with more general aims, still focused on freely sharing scans of comic books. So much so that in 2009 the scans_daily LiveJournal account was suspended for copyright violation.
- For a long time the relationship between comics and webcomics remained tight out of commercial reasons and most comics authors considered the commercial implications of an unprintable comic. Such was the case with Dash Shaw’s webcomic, Bodyworld, serialized between 2007 and 2009.
- It was set to be printed from the very beginning so concessions were made on both fronts, only that the Web was already having a mutating effect on the form, as demonstrated by the flap of the book placed on top of it, not sideways
- At first the comic might appear conventional, laid on a 3 by 4 grid and looking “like a weird Bruce Timm cartoon”, but it approaches, even if it not embraces, the electronic medium in more than one way.
- First, in the production itself, Shaw draws the panels by hand, scans them individually, lays out flats in Photoshop, prints them then scans them again and retouches the coloring in an almost ritualistic manner of shifting from analog to digital to analog to digital again.
- There are influences from the digital world in the aesthetics, such as representing drug trips through glitches
- or using abbreviations popular on the Internet as graphical onomatopoeias.
- There is a liberal mixing and matching of diagrams and comics anticipating the popular marketing and PR tool known as infographics.
- But the way he uses the scroll is what makes this comic of note. At times he uses the vertical nature of the scroll to elegantly transform the grid into three adjacent narrative columns, breaking the linear narrative into two, one column acting as a buffer then merging the two strands into one wide image. He does this without employing any additional graphic signifiers, only trusting that the reader will understand and accept the new grammer created by the relation between the images and the direction of the scroll.
- He even employs a mccloudian infinite canvas as the reader scrolls from a futuristic skyline towards a burning weed on the ground.
- But, the most potentially transformative use of the scroll is also one the simplest. A regular webcomic would present a short episode, then ask the reader to press a button for the next short strip; there is no opportunity to establish a contiguous and immersive reading experience, since everything is start-and-stop.
- On the other hand, in a Scans Daily post, the sequence would scroll to end, losing the page-turns;
- a piece of comics’ grammar that Scott McCloud saw as a limitation of print media, but nonetheless sought to reinvent when describing The Infinite Canvas.
- Shaw mixes the two approaches packing a narratively and tonally contiguous part of the comic in a single scrollable page, as long as it needs to be, then signals the break with a link to the a next part. It’s not an immediately impressive feat, but mutations rarely are.
- This approach was observed by Zack Soto and most comics published on his Study Group Comics portal use this it to signify chapter breaks, where, coincidently or not, Bodyworld has been reposted.
- It also has been adopted, consciously or not, by multiple webcomics such as Sacred Heart
- On a Sunbeam
- or Firelight Isle
- Firelight Isle adds a slight mutation of its own by moving away from the grid based way of sequencing, mixing gutters with onomatopoeic barriers with diegetic empty space to separate the moments of action.
- Zack Soto, again, discovers a new technique when adapting his print minicomic, Secret Voice, for the Study Group Comics website.
- Comics critic and author Frank Santoro noted that Soto “had reformatted [the comic], zoomed in and zoomed out of the original print version, and created a reading experience that felt like it went on for pages and pages”. Translating the comic from print to the scrolling web, Zack Soto changed the experiential time of his narrative.
- An evolution and practical application of this can be found later in Sam Alden’s Hollow. The comic is deceptively simple, each page having only two panels of equal size, without variation in an approach that might seem even misguided by seemingly trying to emulate cinematic language.
- Sensation reinforced by the consistent framing and constant point of view and indeed filmic blocking.
- But Alden, through the moments he chose to draw plays with time in ways that would feel gimmicky in a film. Just by his own skill in figure drawing, rendering and the scrolling effect, without the need for additional scripting, he manages to create slow-down and speed-up effects that genuinely enhance the scene, instead of feeling manipulative as they could have been in a film.
- But by far and beyond, the next leap in adapting the comics language to the scrolling web can be found in Emily Carroll’s work. His Face All Red stands in its own page with a black background and the links to the next chapter share the comic’s visual identity.
- The otherwise zig-zagy way of reading is replaced by verticality where the height of the panels is much more free to expand and contract
- and small isolated panels can have a heightened impact.
- Adding to that, the chapters are of variable length, from many screen-heights long
- to just one panel, creating anticipation and playing with the reader’s expectations using the digital page-turn to great effect.
- Her comics from thereon are a synthesis of McCloud's ideas of The Infinite Canvas, the visual language of the web, letting it shape the structure and aesthetics of the comic in the same way Goodbrey let the layout of the gallery to shape those of his, and the ways other authors have let the Web shape their own comics.
- Most, if not all, of the examples discussed here barely make use of anything other than the basic affordances of HTML and the principles of comic book grammar. While theoreticians such as Adam Hammond might see this as a proof of “ambivalence to digital authorship” it can at the very least serve as a mechanism of preserving the comics, allowing them to be read by and to influence new generations of creators, as such establishing a common new language through small incremental changes. Establishing the canon.
- Scrolling allows for control and knowledge. Knowing when a reader has a certain portion of the text in her viewport is valuable information, but it hasn’t been used for much other than just triggering animations, such as in The Boat.
- An even rarer use is that of wrestling control back from the reader, but it can be done.
- But scrolling can tell us how long a reader lingered on a specific portion of the text, letting the author present different narratives accordingly. This could be used to create a non-ergodic hypertextual comic, that remains it domain of reading instead of bringing it into that of playing. Outside of art, something similar is done through A/B testing, when different versions of the same website are randomly presented to readers in order to see how their engagement changes.
- Scrolling can be done vertically. On the web this shifts our mode of reading to re-reading. We are consatantly scrolling through our feeds, reading and rereading. Finding ways to explore the same text, with or without variations, could be a valuable mutation as well, especially when it come to tackling memory and remembering.
- Using the biological concepts of mutant, hybrid, atavism and speciation as metaphors for artistic and technological evolution, this presentation argues for circumspection and patience when studying electronic literature. Instead of devoting most scholarly work on multimedia hybrids, attention should be brought on how the use of language mutates in a contiguous body of work, over time. For this purpose, the presenation brought to attention that the digital domain in itself is constantly affected by evolutionary pressures which makes it inhospitable not to literature in itself, but to the establishing of a literary canon. In support of this argument, we looked at comic books, a literary tradition where characteristics sought in electronic literature, such as multimodality, are already exhibited. In particular, it looks at Scott McCloud’s concept of The Infinite Canon and the way it evolved alongside webcomics such as Bodyworld and the work of Emily Carroll.