Friday, October 15, 2004

writing in waveforms

tone row poetry is a beautiful new media piece on the turbulence site. its premise is a simple one - that language is all about translation.

Communication requires mimesis; right now, I'm stringing a daisy chain of tokens together, each of which you can apprehend and appreciate, because we're speaking the same language. This is convention; as Saussure pointed out, it's arbitrary. I am trying to convey something to you, something about this piece Tone Row Poetry that I've been working on, so I'm tracing with a crayon some jagged lines that by convention mimic what I need to tell you about it.

tone row poetry replaces words for sounds, so that a sentence becomes a soundscape - its message conveyed through emotive scratches and blips instead of marks on the page or screen. it’s a pretty clean example of transcoding, or as the author puts it, "crayoning waveforms".

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