This chapter explores the nature and communicative uses of irregular and distressed shapes in graphics. Its argument begins with a paradox.
Consider the three graphic structures depicted as Figure 9.1a and 9.1b. While all three—depending on the situation—express the concept of ‘circle’ or ‘round’, they look distinctly different. Figure 9.1a has a clean, regular outline whereas the outline of Figure 9.1b is distressed and irregular, showing many little dips, bumps and streaks. Figure 9.1c, on casual inspection, appears regular, but attention to detail reveals many little irregularities. We produced the three circles ourselves using Adobe’s vector-based Illustrator software for Figure 9.1a and a cheap, flat 1-inch paintbrush and watered-down black acrylic paint on plain white 100-gram photocopy paper for Figures 9.1b and 9.1c. Neither of the first two marks, Figures 9.1a and 9.1b, took particular effort to produce. Figure 9.1c, however, took considerable effort.
Effort, whether understood as sensorimotor output or as cognitive load, is crucial for understanding our paradox. While the crisp, clean outline of Figure 9.1a took very little effort to achieve using Illustrator, producing its equivalent with brush and paint would require care and control sustained over a relatively long time. Conversely, while the irregular and distressed shape of Figure 9.1b came about more or less spontaneously as a result of dynamical interactions of bodily movement, brush, paint and surface, it would take time, care and control to produce it with a computer.
Handmade regularity almost always reveals irregularities, even when an effort is made to produce regularity, as in Figure 9.2—compare, for instance, the R of BRUSH and the R of HOLDER or the A of AS and the A of A BIN.
Even the severe rectilinear neoplasticism of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg reveals imperfections that are the inevitable traces of living sensorimotor contingencies as Mondrian and Van Doesburg painted their straight black lines and brightly primary-coloured geometric shapes. Conversely, synthesised irregularity of the kind that has become widespread in contemporary type design almost always reveals regularity if one knows what to look for. For example, the type family ‘Kiln’, designed in 2016 by Ryan Martinson for Yellow Design Studio, is described as a “[…] timeworn, hand-crafted type family […] a historical revival with modern twists” (MyFonts, 2016). Each letterform, numeral and glyph in the Kiln character set is textured to appear as if the print is worn off. The effect is quite convincing as each character comes in two “distress options” (MyFonts, 2016) which become intermingled to ensure that no two adjacent letters have the same texture. This taxes our ability to detect patterns to the point that we do not notice that Kiln characters usually have identical twins in any given line of text.
The paradox, then, is this: given that digital technology tends to produce a regular, crisp and clean output, why is there such a proliferation of irregular and distressed shape in graphics that are clearly produced with computers? What needs to be expressed so urgently that designers expend considerable time and effort to make synthetic graphics look like the result of sensorimotor contingencies? These are semiotic questions. They lead us to ask (1) what meanings can be conveyed by irregularity, (2) how those meanings come about and (3) why they are important to us.
Our argument in this chapter unfolds in three steps. In Section 2 we address the first of the preceding questions by discussing Van Leeuwen’s (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Van Leeuwen, 1999) concept of experiential meaning potential, which—or so we argue—links the contingencies of semiotic production with cultural meaning. In Section 3, we address the second question, how such meanings come about, by discussing graphetic production (Johannessen, 2011, 2016, in press). In Section 4, we frame the third question, why these meanings are culturally important.
In Lines. A Brief History, Tim Ingold defines a graphic trace thus: “In our terms the trace is any enduring mark left in or on a solid surface by a continuous movement” (Ingold, 2007: 43). Movements, of course, come in many sorts. Some are fast, some slow; some are deliberate, some accidental. They can be highly skilled, practiced, choreographed and precise or erratic and imprecise. And the traces created by these movements therefore come in many varieties too.
Figure 9.3 depicts four circles, all of which we have adapted from the visual identities of humanitarian organisations. Figure 9.3a is adapted from the ‘SaveThe Children’ logo, Figure 9.3b from the ‘Friends of the Earth’ logo, Figure 9.3c from the logo of ‘Plan’ and Figure 9.3d from that of ‘Ibis’. All four circles have a distinctly hand-drawn look, but, crucially for our argument, they do not look as if they have been drawn in the same way. Consider which one was drawn with a swift gesture, and which more slowly? Which in a controlled and careful, and which in a careless way? Which light-handedly, and which heavy-handedly? In all likelihood, people will find that Figure 9.3a comes across as slower, lighter, more precise, practised, and controlled and Figure 9.3d as faster, heavier, more careless and erratic. Interestingly, neither of the four circles is, in fact, a trace resulting from actual gestures. They were designed using digital vector graphics applications, such as Adobe Illustrator, and have never once, in the sequence of representations that brought them to the pages of this book, been in mechanical contact with handheld graphic implements.
This begs two questions: First, how can we tell, just from looking at a static graphic signifier, the quality of the movement that went into its production? And, second, how can we be sure when no such movement ever actually took place?
In Speech, Music, Sound, Theo van Leeuwen (1999) coined the theoretical concept of experiential meaning potential, which will serve as a first step in our discussion of the meanings that can be expressed by irregularity. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Van Leeuwen (1999: 140) wrote,
The signification these features contribute to […] can be derived from an experiential meaning potential, that is, from what we do when we produce the sounds, either vocally or with our hands and/or feet, and from our ability to turn action into knowledge, to extend our practical experiences metaphorically, and to grasp similar extensions made by others.
In other words, experiential meaning potential foregrounds doing, and, by extension, (1) situated attention to one’s own doing, (2) sensorimotor knowledge (see generally Noë, 2004) gained over a long time and (3) understanding the situated doings of other people in the light of familiarity with one’s own doings.
Every person has an autobiographical memory of sensorimotor experiences of symbolic activities going back to infancy, for example the activities of vocalising, speaking, singing, gesturing, grimacing and, indeed, trace-making, in all kinds of emotional states and social settings. Such knowledge can be hypothesised to arise by attending to and reflecting on the results of one’s own doing as one does it. In systemic terms, one loops one’s own output (changes in the environment) back into the system as input (changes in the system).
Van Leeuwen discusses the universal experience of tense voice. When we are in states of emotional strain, we tend to tense our muscles, including the muscles in our throat, as a result of which our voice
[…] becomes higher (lower overtones are reduced, higher overtones increased), sharper, brighter, and, above all, more tense, because in their tensed state the walls of the throat cavity dampen the sound less than they would in relaxed state […] The sounds that result from tensing not only is tense, it also means ‘tense’—and makes tense.
(Van Leeuwen, 1999: 130ff. Italics in the original)
Our sensorimotor experience is always situated and so our emotional state in the situation is an aspect of it. On Van Leeuwen’s view, movement and affect are inextricably mixed in our experience, which is why muscular tension through experiential knowledge comes to mean emotive tension, and, through the affective attunement of interlocutors, ultimately makes a situation tense.
Similarly, we know from our own experience of trace-making how graphic traces like the four circles in Figure 9.3 were produced. From infancy, we attend to the way movement leaves more or less enduring traces: “In the child, both writing and drawing develop from what I call the fundamental graphic act, the making of traces on a surface that constitute a progressive record of movement” (Gibson, 1986 [1979]: 275). Children smear gravy or mashed potatoes on the table and wonder at their ability to change the world according to their intentions. Or they use sticks to leave scratchings on the ground or ephemeral traces on the surface of a puddle. Under parental (and instructional) guidance such activities evolve into drawing, painting, writing and so on.
All these instances of doing are situated both in terms of setting and in terms of resources. Sometimes the experience unfolds in the kitchen, and the stuff involved is mash and fork; sometimes it happens in arts and crafts settings, and the stuff involved is paint and paintbrush. The experiential meaning potential of graphic traces inextricably blends personal experiences of movement, emotion and matter with intertextuality. We know where certain kinds of doing take place. Some kinds of doing become cliché. The breathiness of Marilyn Monroe’s voice in her televised performance of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” on 19 May 1962 has become a cliché of sultriness and intimacy. Similarly, some kinds of irregular, erratic graphic traces have become clichés of childhood (see Figure 9.4)—just as the four circles in Figure 9.3 can be seen as clichés of ‘the human touch’ in humanitarian discourse. They are not the actual traces of actual movements. They are conventional depictions, informed by and endowed with experiential meaning potential, of what certain kinds of graphic traces look like.
In this section we have addressed what meanings can be conveyed by irregularity in terms of experiential meaning potential. In Section 3 we discuss, in more detail, how such meanings come about by discussing graphetic production.
In order to get a firmer grasp on the kind of doing graphic trace-making is, we need at least a rough description of its dynamical constraints. In this chapter, we propose to do so by analogy to phonetics. Modern phonetics distinguishes three subfields pertaining to speech production (sometimes referred to as articulatory phonetics, see Hockett, 1958), speech perception (auditory phonetics) and the speech signal itself (acoustic phonetics).
Developing a full graphic analogy is far beyond the scope and limits of this chapter. At this stage in the argument, we are chiefly interested in the relation between the production of the graphic trace and the trace itself as text. However, a fully developed discipline of graphetics should aim to understand the material underpinnings of graphic production and perception as well as the traces themselves.
The study of phonetic production (and indeed perception and acoustics) can be regarded, in a word, as a study of effort. Although many phoneticians may not habitually think in these terms because their interests are invested in generalising patterns in the medium of speech and mapping them onto linguistic descriptions of language, phonetics can also be regarded as the energetic study of energy under transformation in speech behaviour. Phonetics is underwritten by our physiological and anatomical understanding of how metabolically derived energy from food is transformed by muscles (in the floor and walls of the chest) into potential energy as air pressure, into kinetic energy as air flow, and ultimately into acoustic energy, which is perceived as sound. For phonetics, energy is the ground on which pattern comes into focus as figure. At the risk of simplifying, the study of phonetic production is concerned with the way humans move the different organs of the so-called vocal tract to produce speech sounds by (1) compressing air trapped in the cavities of the tract and (2) directing and manipulating flows of thus compressed air through the tract. Air interacting with vocal tract is the material substrate for speech, but so is metabolically derived energy. Speaking as a process is an energetic transformation, an effort—even if most of the time it feels effortless.
One classic text, David Abercrombie’s Elements of General Phonetics, enumerates three epistemological categories of observations one can make about vocal articulation. These pertain to (a) segmental features, (b) features of voice quality and (c) features of voice dynamics (Abercrombie, 1967: 89). Insofar as we are looking to phonetics for inspiration on how to grasp meaningful aspects of graphic traces that derive from their origin in movement, only the latter two are of immediate interest1 to our discussion of irregularity in graphic traces. For our purpose here, we refer to their analogies as trace quality and trace dynamics.
In phonetics, features of voice quality (Abercrombie, 1967: 91), or timbre (Van Leeuwen, 1999: 125), are understood to be innate to the speaker’s body and so beyond his or her ability to control. The voices of individuals can be colloquially described as, for example, cracked, dry, flat, hollow, husky, melodious, raucous, rough, thin or tinny (Abercrombie, 1967: 94) because they are born with physical characteristics that produce such qualities (bone structures, volumes of cavities, length of vocal chords, etc.) or because they have more or less permanent deformities caused by, for example, laryngitis or a common cold. Whether permanent or transient, such qualities are due to the dynamical characteristics of the speaker’s body. Interestingly, an often-overlooked contribution to voice quality comes from the gaseous component of the substrate. It is usually taken for granted, as exceptions to breathing air are borderline cases, but the minute one inhales helium from a balloon one comes to appreciate the effects on voice quality given by the dynamical constraints of different gases. In the case of phonetic production, the dynamical characteristics of the speaker’s body as well as the gas interact to form a possibility space for speech production. Individuals cannot produce speech sounds that are not afforded by the relation between the capabilities of their bodies and the characteristics of air (following Gibson, 1986[1979], see generally Chemero 2011: Chapter 7, for discussion).
Similarly, trace quality must be understood in the light of the dynamical interactions between body, tool, pigment (if any) and support (or surface). The variety of tools, pigments and supports in use in graphic production is too vast to do any justice here. Suffice to say that the dynamics of hairs on, for example, paintbrushes yield very different traces. Some are long; some are short. Some are natural, some are synthetic, some are thick and yet others are thin. Such characteristics combine into brushes that are more or less springy, that fan out more or less when pressure is applied, that hold more or less paint and so on. The same goes for ball points, pen nibs, felt tips, quills and so on. Similarly with pigments. Pigments can be dry or wet; they can have different viscosities, volatilities, and so on. Supports, such as papers, canvasses, woods and stones, differ in smoothness, grain, texture and absorptiveness. Tools, pigments and supports come in endless variety, all of which yields characteristic trace qualities.
Whereas the features of voice quality are largely beyond the speaker’s controlled effort, the features of trace quality in graphetic production are not. The producer is free to pick different tools, different pigments and different supports, thus changing the possibility space for graphetic production.
At first glance, the distinctions among body, tool, pigment and support seem straightforward. The graphic producer holds a pen in the hand (body), the pen (tool) is dipped in ink (pigment) and the nib of the pen is in mechanical contact with paper (support). However, as ecological psychologist James Gibson eloquently argues, tools are properly understood as extensions of the body:
When in use, a tool is a sort of extension of the hand, almost an attachment to it or part of the user’s own body, and thus is no longer a part of the environment of the user […] This capacity to attach something to the body suggest that the boundary between the environment and the animal is not fixed at the surface of the skin but can shift. More generally it suggests that the absolute duality of “objective” and “subjective” is false. When we consider the affordances of things, we escape this philosophical dichotomy.
(Gibson, 1986 [1979]: 41)
As the earlier helium example demonstrates, inasmuch as we tend not to experience air in any tool-like sense when we speak, air is very much a constituent part of the material substrate of speech and so—from the perspective of semiotic production—of similar status to brush, paint and canvas. A fully developed, general description of the materiality of multimodal communication may have to abandon time-honoured distinctions between body and non-body and instead think in terms of (extended) agent and world. A fully satisfactory answer to such questions remains elusive, but it seems clear from recent work on so-called 4E cognition (the idea that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended and enacted; see Clark, 1998, 2008; Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Hollan, Hutchins, and Kirsh, 2000; Ingold, 2007; Malafouris, 2013; Menary, 2010) that humans (and higher primates) are so profoundly capable of constantly renegotiating the agent–world boundary that distinctions between body and tool seems to rely more on culturally determined distinctions than on how our bodies are coupled to the environment.
In phonetics, features of voice dynamics are generally considered to be under the speaker’s control. They are directly derived from effort, from the energetic undulations of the speaker’s body. Under the conditions of normal speech, we experience voice dynamics as effortless, but the strain of speaking becomes apparent, however, when we operate outside our vocal range or otherwise tax our ability. Loudness of voice is most obviously energetic—speaking very loudly exhausts the pistons in the vocal tract. But prolonged change in pitch, tessitura, tempo and so on (cf. Abercrombie, 1967: 95) also requires effort. Trying to deliver a 45-minute lecture in 15 minutes or having a conversation during a rock concert gives a good idea about how voice dynamics can be regarded as energetic.
We can conceive of a graphetic field of inquiry on analogy with voice dynamics, which analyses the distribution of energy in the production of the trace—not as loudness, pitch and tessitura, among others—but as velocity, pressure, (horizontal and vertical) expansion, fluidity (more or less circular or angular gestures) and similar energetic aspects of the dynamical interaction between body and graphic material resulting in distinctive trace features such as those described by Van Leeuwen (2006, 2011).
Regardless of the material involved in graphetic production, no trace is made save for a movement across a surface. Insofar as a trace is a progressive recording of a movement, there is a lawful relation between, on the one hand, every little tremor of the hand, every microscopic event of individual hairs on the brush and its interaction with pigment and surface, and, on the other, information in the trace about these events. Every little dip and bump on its outline shape can be traced back to micro-events in the production. These are the irregularities we have under consideration.
By now, we have given considerable attention to describing how irregularity spontaneously arises through the dynamical interactions of bodies, tools, pigments and supports. However, considering the paradox with which we set out, a discussion of graphetic production would be severely biased if it did not also take into consideration the countless instances of graphics produced by means of digital technology.
Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006: 217) distinguish “three major classes of ‘production technologies’ ”, which seem to align with our intuitive understanding of the differences between paintbrushes and Adobe Illustrator. The first, which corresponds with the earlier discussion of dynamical interactions between body, tool, pigment, and support, they call “technology of the hand, technologies in which representations are, in all their aspects, articulated by the human hand, aided by hand-held tools such as chisels, brushes, pencils, etc.” (2006: 217). The second, which is of little relevance here, they call “recording technologies […] which allow more or less automated analogical representation of what they represent, for instance, audiotape, photography, and film” (2006: 217). The third, which corresponds with Adobe Illustrator, is
synthesizing technology, which allow the production of digitally synthesized representations. While remaining tied to the eye (and ear), these reintroduce the human hand via a technological ‘interface’, at present still in the shape of a tool (keyboard, mouse), though in the future perhaps increasingly through direct articulation by the body.
(2006: 217)
In general, synthesising technologies have dynamical properties that are very different from those of technologies of the hand. Drawing a clean, regular circle such as the one in Figure 9.1a in a software environment takes drastically less effort than drawing an distressed, irregular one such as shown in Figure 9.1b, and also Figures 9.3a, 9.3b, 9.3c and 9.3d.
Current state of the art synthesising technologies for graphetic production can be roughly sorted into two distinct categories depending on how they translate the graphic support (or surface), in the user interface. One is colloquially known as the bitmap model which, simply put, analytically breaks the surface into a rectilinear grid. Information about graphic traces is represented in the grid as information about the colour of each individual cell, or pixel, in the grid. The second is colloquially known as the vector model. Here, the support is interpreted as two-dimensional Euclidian space. Information about the outline shape of a graphic trace is represented in the coordinate system as a number of coordinates, known as ‘anchor points’, connected by curves, called ‘Bezier curves’ after the French engineer and mathematician Pierre Bezier, who invented them for CAD/CAM machining systems in the 1970s. Both bitmap and vector are ubiquitous in contemporary graphic industry, but, although there is considerable spill over from the one to the other, bitmap is typically associated with photography and screen-based media, whereas vector is associated with graphics and print media.
Although digital bandwidths, digital storage and microprocessor speeds continue to increase, so do our expectations of the fidelity of representations. As a result, file sizes also increase and, all else being equal, digital representation of graphics will generally tend to employ the simplest practically possible description (i.e. the lowest practical number of anchor points or pixels and colours) required to adequately account for a given graphic trace. Software is designed to calculate, by default, the simplest practical solution to a description. This is part of the reason why graphics produced using synthesising technologies have a clean, regular look.
Furthermore, whereas technologies of the hand relate directly to the dynamical interaction of the trace-maker with materials, in digital graphics the material interactions are completely different. When the graphic producers who use synthesising technology move their hand, something measurable happens in the circuitry of the computer. Electrical currents are affected in a direct relation to the hand movements, and microprocessor flip-flops then change states, upon which the intensity of light emitted from pixels on the screen increases or decreases. In the designers’ experience, they do not act bodily on flip-flops or pixels but on a shape-in-becoming on the screen. However, the relation between their bodily movements and the thing on the screen is not mechanical. There is a mediating layer of design, of software design, of user-interface design, user-experience design, and so on inserted between them and the trace. The information in a synthetic trace is designed. If a digital trace looks handmade, it is because it has been designed to be a conventional representation of what we can agree that a handmade trace looks like.
The question remains: Why does a designer make the effort to represent dynamical information about trace quality and trace dynamics, what in section we referred to as experiential meaning potential, when in synthesising technology no such information naturally occurs? What does it add that so urgently needs to be expressed? Why is it important to us? In Section 4 we shall attempt an answer based on experiential meaning potential while also drawing on experiential metaphor and provenance.
Writing is a form of trace-making in which most of us participate. Throughout the 20th century and still today, the teaching of writing has emphasised regularity (Sassoon, 1999). Being able to produce ‘neat’, regular writing requires skill, control and discipline. Experience tells us, however, that writing can become irregular for a number of reasons, (1) because we do not as yet have the skills to produce regular writing, as, for instance, in the case of young children (see Figure 9.5); (2) because we do not want to produce neat, regular writing, perhaps because we do not value it for some reason, or even rebel against the order it imposes; (3) because the tools and materials we use make it difficult to produce regularity, as when we try to write with a springy brush, or with watercolours, or on a paper serviette; or (4) because intoxication, or some temporary or permanent infirmity, makes it difficult to produce regularity. In all these cases irregularity is ‘indexical’, actually caused by sensorimotor contingencies.
But irregularity can also be deliberately produced when none of these contingencies are present. Symptoms then become signs. Yet we will still understand them on the basis of experiences such as those we have described earlier, through the process of experiential metaphor (Van Leeuwen, 2005: 29) in which what we do as we make traces is recontextualised as an abstract quality of what we try to communicate through those traces. The irregular letterforms and bright colours of childish fonts such as the one shown in Figure 9.4, which came about through the child’s lack of skill, can now be produced by adult designers to mean ‘childish exuberance’ or ‘playful creativity’—even when we encounter it in contexts which have no direct connection to childishness, for instance, in the logo of Google, where the same exuberant primary colours we saw in Figure 9.4 also stand for playful creativity—with a hint of transgression, since green is not actually a primary colour.
Transgressing the discipline of neat, regular writing can also become a metaphor. Disorder and irregularity can be carefully designed to signify transgression in some way or other. Figure 9.6 is drawn after a page from a a magazine for young drivers produced by the Roads and Traffic Authority of New South Wales, Australia. The article warns young drivers against consuming alcohol or drugs while driving. Irregular shapes with distressed edges (for instance in the word busted and the arrow next to it) typographically express the idea of ‘transgression’, here in a negative context. But transgression may also be positively valued, as for instance in the heavy metal album cover shown in Figure 9.7, which also uses irregularly sized and spaced letterforms, distressed edges and lack of alignment.
The font used in Figure 9.8, a page from an inflight magazine, combines experiential meaning potential and provenance. The letters are clearly meant to be perceived as having been painted with a fairly coarse brush. But our understanding of them will also draw on a culture-specific discourse in which brush strokes are a valued characteristic of modern art, reinforcing the reference to surrealism in the title of the article.
The difference between handwriting and mechanically or digitally produced writing can become a source of meaning in itself—where there is difference, there is meaning. Here too meaning is based on experience. But whether mechanically or digitally produced writing will be valued positively for its perfection, or negatively for its mechanical dehumanisation will depend on the context. An immaculately printed student essay acquires a professional look and the status that comes with ‘being in print’. But a printed dinner invitation will not be as highly valued as a handwritten one, because here handwriting is a sign of personal attention which expresses the unique individuality of the host. Effort and care have been expended on it.
Such handwriting, however, can now be digitally produced, as is the case with the ‘brush strokes’ in Figure 9.8 (compare the a’s and the n’s, for example). When this happens the writing only signifies ‘individuality’, and codifies what earlier escaped codification. Rather than that individuality is produced from within, from deep-seated sensorimotor experiences, it is now a surface customisation added to what, underneath, remains entirely regular.
Figure 9.9 shows the breakfast menu of a hotel chain, identical in all of the company’s more than 700 hotels but nevertheless introducing irregularity to suggest uniqueness and individual choice (‘Your way as much as you like’). On closer inspection it is, again, a regularised irregularity. While the letterforms are differently sized and irregularly aligned, it is nevertheless easy to see, for instance, that the Es and the Rs in ‘Premier Inn Breakfast’ are identical, to the slightest (irregular) detail.
The ubiquity of this kind of irregularity suggests that, in an age of increasing homogenisation and regularisation, people still value individuality, handmadeness, uniqueness and authenticity, even when, paradoxically, these are only available to them in regularised, synthetic forms.
We have, in this chapter, argued that traces make meaning in an embodied and material way, through the bodily gestures and the physical tools and materials that articulate them, and that our understanding of traces is informed by our accumulated experience of the effect of these gestures, tools and materials on the traces they produce. Even when traces are no longer handmade, they will still be understood on the basis of this kind of experience, although the fact that they are not handmade will also contribute to their meaning: we recognise that they are not and could not have been made by hand, and as a result they can come to mean, in some sense, either ‘more than human’ (e.g. ‘too perfect to be human’), or ‘less than human’ (e.g. ‘mechanical’, ‘devoid of life’).
Focusing on the gestures that articulate traces, we have argued that these are complex, an amalgam of different qualities, each opening up a distinct meaning potential. As an example, we have discussed irregularity, arguing that our experience of trace-making tells us what can cause irregularity—for instance lack of skill, intoxication, some kind of temporal or permanent infirmity, a dislike of regularity or the use of tools and materials which make it difficult to produce regularity. In specific contexts irregularity can therefore evoke ideas about childhood or about forms of deprivation which make appropriate tools and materials unavailable (for instance, carvings on the walls of prison cells). In contrast with mechanically or digitally produced traces, handmade traces have also come to mean ‘authentic’, ‘individual’, ‘personal’ and so on. It is exactly because such values have become so precious to us in the age of mass production and templatisation that computer-generated traces have also introduced irregularity even though ultimately they can never escape the regime of regularity.
More generally, we hope that we have been able to make a case for the importance of paying greater attention to the biological and physical materiality of visual communication. Just as speech makes meaning, not only through the lexicon and the grammar but also through the physicalities of voice production, so trace-making, whether as writing or otherwise, makes meaning, not only through iconology and visual grammar but also through the physicalities of trace-making. Much still needs to be done to flesh these ideas towards a theory that does justice to all the trace qualities involved and to their intricate relations to the qualities of tools and materials, but we hope that this chapter will at least be a step in that direction.
1The study of the articulation of segmental features is not a concern here. Articulations are patterns (in “place” and “manner”, see Abercrombie 1967: 47) of movement of structures in the mouth and nose that give rise to syllabic segments in speech. However, syllabic script is not lawfully related to anatomical ‘place’ and sensorimotor ‘manner’ in the same way as syllabic segments of speech (a given syllabic graph can be produced in any number of ways, a syllable, however, cannot), and any analogy between the two would be extremely forced.
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