D is for dialogue: If the origin of spoken language can be located in the vicinity of the imitation of the world's sounds, written language has its origins in the mimetic moment of visual art in depicting that world. At some point, written language’s sympathy with things, on the one hand their sound qualities, on the other their visuality, gave way to the pragmatic function of increasing the capacity of a standardised written form. This aimed to communicate sense in a highly articulate manner to a maximum number of participants. No doubt technological advances are somehow caught up in the rise of this utilitarian standardisation, most significantly the invention of printing presses, and more recently, the widespread availability of type-writers and personal computers. This is not to say that these technological interventions into language form need only be directed toward the ends of a utilitarian standardisation of language. This has only been the trend so far because technological instruments usually get used in practical and pragmatic ways. It is possible to imagine how the advent of powerfrul personal computers, which for many people in affluent countries are no longer simply practical or pragmatic tools, may already be in the process of altering this trend. By allowing for the collision of a number of media in the one space (text and hypertext, static and animated images, voice and sound), PCs may already be significantly altering our expectations of language use.

To date, written language has displayed a tendency to neutralise its own visual component in order to serve the utilitarian end of a language predicated on producing a clearer and more stabilised form of language. Standardised fonts, characters, alphabets and symbols take their allotted place in the construction of sentences containing correctly spelt words, each with a dictionary approved range of universally accepted meanings. In turn, these must be placed within the larger standardised macro-architecture of texts, in lines of sentences and blocks of paragraphs read left to right, or as in the case of poetic constructions, in lines of left-justified sentences running from top to bottom of page. The standardised versions of language which we are all supposed to learn in school for the purpose of carrying out the pragmatic functions of contemporary life take their cue from the utilitarian approach to the written form. Obviously, spoken forms of language continue to exist which purposely evade or inadvertently fall out of this utilitarian approach. Often, however, these have to carry the stigma of being imperfect or improper language usage.

The perfection of a highly articulated written form reaches us moderns through the legacy of a humanism in language usage which sought to expand human meanings above the alien shapes and noises of non-human origin which once filled the natural world. Within this same hierarchy, certain forms of human language expression are seen to fall below the possibilities of a truly triumphant humanist ideal of language usage: "primitive" languages, baby-talk, the ramblings of the mad, the meanderings of the senile, the imperfect diction of the migrant, the toothless splutterings of the geriatric. Such "lesser" modes of expression end up being measured against an ideal of highly articulated usage which privileges a stabilised and standardised code of determinable meanings, epitomised by official letters of bureaucratic origin or journalistic reportage. An idealised code of this sort marginalises both the contingency and flux of sound and ossifies the interfaces between the visual and the sonorous. The deployment of onomatopoeia should therefore aid to reawaken and open up written language to these possibilities of language simultaneously, aiming at a written language less defensively constructed as an ideal form and more fluid in its movement between sounds and shapes ...

language as waves
becoming written

form through varying approaches
to the boundaries between
the sonorous and the visual

a process of endless possibilities

which the writing machine has once again

set loose