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I refused the dichotomy. I did not reject the pairing. Indeed, for me eye and ear worked in tandem. From childhood I culled experiential moments : an oscilloscope allows one to see sound waves just like the patterns of sand on the stretched skin of a reverberating drum. I belonged to the regime of notation where artefacts are neutral as to the sense that places them in an event horizon, neutral as to the sensory relays that activate aesthetic and cognitive experiences. All sculpture was kinetic; you could move around it; you could make the camera move; painting danced. The mechanical reproduction of art did more than make it move. Under the lens of time-lapse photography it mutated. My encounters with technology repeatedly demonstrated that the activity of ear and of eye occupy the same cognitive territory, a terrritory of transactions. I was yet to build an ideological base for contesting the grand assertion that the civilization of the grid that arose from the mass adoption of the printing press and perspectival drawing was one of detachment and that the ear-dominated tribal epoque that went before it was marked by participation. I found it odd that accompanying this assertion was the story of a reversion to tribalism caused by the maturing of the electric age. The invocation of cycles at this scale reduces itself to a not so evident commonplace -- something lost; something gained. However even within the parameters of finite intelligent capacity, it is not the undisputed case that a skill gained is a skill lost. Going native is achieving mastery. I want to suggest that the mapping of participation/detachment upon ear-eye is mediated at a particular conjuncture by easy/hard. Let me recall the example of dictation-recitation. Either is easy or difficult depending upon a variety of factors including knowledge of the natural language in question and the speed of the delivery. Speed or pace of voice could be reflected in size of ledding and other typographical elements or heard in the technically inflected games with the settings of a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I also recall experiments with tiny tiny script and hours spent peering through magnifying glasses. I can call back too the presto-largo capbilities of a turntable in the days of vinyl. From the position of the child at play, legibility or audibility equally demand attention. As I grew older I learnt how to apply the tools of literary criticism. I grew sensitive to rhetorical moves. I remain quite fond of Erasmus and the exercises of the De Copia, a most exemplary textbook for the game of variation and the stretching of semantic fields. Another influence was of course Fredric Jameson and his practice of transcoding. Transcoding is not so much pulling the latent rabbit out of the manifest hat. It is perhaps more like the analytic struggles to find the rustling hints of displacement. Transcoding consists of eloquent variations of ideological critique. Re-reading the literature, I was intrigued as to how detachment/participation was linked via distance/participation to eye-ear. Examing the stories that wove together spatial relations, quality of social interation and sensory modalities, I was not prepared to endorse the theory of an inevitable repressive slide (a mind versus body affair). I was on the hunt for alternative formulations, scanning the horizon for far echoes. The truth of the alignment distance-detachment-sight was not self-evident. It represented an atomistic approach to the senses. Anyone who could remember passing notes in class or at a lecture would be less likely to equate the eye with far and the ear with close. Range is relative. Certain forms of participation require distance. Proximity is not immune to detachment. It was after all in quasi-myopic close reading that the bond that wedded the emotional to the spatial was questioned. The questioning spread. I negated the statement "the medium is the message" and negated the negation to discover that media are bundles of messages with the corollary that media effects are differential. There are other ways to assess the impact of the printing press and perspectival drawing. They are instances of the technology of grids. They are not so much extensions of the body as emulations of a body moving in space. The eye moves. The ear adjusts to the location of sound. The hum of white noise can take the foreground or recede. Perception is never passive and is always conducive to giddy abstraction. The body as grid: grids aid tabulation; they can track movement. Map making begins at home.
There is a history of emulations, a history of the
modes of tracking movement, a history of the
variations. Mercator follows like a paraphrase of
Erasmus. No model maker is alien to me, even the one
who rams dichotomies nilly-willy and forever projects
cycles. Those paths at times intersect my own
trajectories. I want to know how and
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