A tractor ploughs a field on the Indian side of the Indo-Pakistan boundary line, with the fields edged with tall Eucalyptus trees. This is happening a stone's throw away from the international boundary that gives so much insecurity to people on both sides of the border.
LODE created opportunities to mark several geographical, historical and political boundaries along the LODE Line, through an artistic process. This was not one of them. Re:LODE provides an opportunity to connect to this and other borders.
Farming and agriculture are a mainstay for the people of Punjab - fly alongside this Indian tractor as it tills the fields with a sardar driver.
Textura
If we return to the origins of "text", as a word, we may find, or re-search something that helps us now with thinking about possible methods for identifying themes, patterns and connections that can be created out of the "field" of "stories".
We are constantly texting these days! And if we want to understand the meaning of a word, don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use! This slogan widely attributed to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was not a formulation actually employed by Wittgenstein himself, although there is some consensus that this was Wittgenstein’s point in the Philosophical Investigations. In section 43 from that work he writes:
For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.So, when we look at the history of the use of the word and its origins, it suggests a set of possible use values for today.
Text in English starts in the late 14th century, where it meant “something written”, It came from Old French texte, or perhaps Old North French tixte, which can be dated to the 12th century, and which was used with a similar meaning.
Before that the word texte came into French from Medieval Latin textus, which had a slightly wider meaning, including the Scriptures. Textus, in turn, derived from Late Latin, where it meant “written account, content”, and unsurprisingly, it came from Latin textus, which was used as “style/ texture of a work”. However, textus literally meant “woven thing”, and is formed from the past participle of the verb texere, meaning “to weave”.
In the first century CE, in his work Institutio Oratoria, Roman orator and rhetorician Quintilian wrote of the importance of choosing the right words carefully and joining them together in a “text”, a woven composition, a metaphor of words being like a threads that could be woven into a fabric.
The Proto-Indo-European root tek, meant “to weave, to fabricate”, and, interestingly, this makes it a cognate of the Greek word τέχνη (techni), today meaning “art”, from which is formed the word “technology”. However, whilst Greek words referring to making and building are related to tek, the Greek word for text is not. It is κείμενο (keimeno), from κείμαι (keimai), meaning “lie, be placed”, and is directly related to the word for “sleep” (“κοιμάμαι”, koimamai), and is also a cognate of “coma”.
κείμαι - meaning; lie, be placed!
There is a kind of bi-directional text called boustrophedon (Ancient Greek: βουστροφηδόν, boustrophēdón "ox-turning" from βοῦς, bous, "ox", στροφή, strophē, "turn" and the adverbial suffix -δόν, "like, in the manner of"; that is, turning like oxen in ploughing), mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions.
Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern European languages, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in boustrophedon must be read in opposite directions. Also, the individual characters are reversed, or mirrored. It was a common way of writing in stone in Ancient Greece.
The reason for mentioning it here in the context of LODE is that this form of text requires the eye and brain to continue following the unbroken line, as in ploughing a field using a plough that is pulled by an Ox. This involves a "reading" that is not our kind of reading. It is tactile, following a furrow in the earth, unbroken rather than a system of writing de-coded left to right and then right to left. It is both sequential and integral.
Phonetic writing depends on the order of the sequence. It is a militant form of communication technology, but the boustrophedon requires the reader to read from left to right and then continue the reading, without gaps between words, from what we would call mirror writing. The text above is not meant to be a puzzle, it is the law, written in stone. The default position of human beings when it comes to a highly technical system of communication is pattern recognition, the kind of skill set found in the "dyslexic". Many of us who gravitate to the visual and sound arts are amongst these kind of zig zaggers.
In mathematics, the boustrophedon transform is a procedure which maps one sequence to another. The transformed sequence is computed by filling a triangular array in a boustrophedon (zig-zag) manner.
Mapping one sequence to another is a method that works to reveal hidden patterns and connections. Some hackers use boustrophedons for an optimization performed by some computer-typesetting software.
The LODE methodology includes this zig zagging approach. Of course there is the LODE line that functions as a guide, but any exploration of spatial formations, geographical, topographical, social, cultural and political requires zig zagging. If the artistic function in society is to create perceptions of the world, both locally and at large it is counter-productive to follow a line of sight wearing blinkers. Scanning is what we do naturally.
Blast blinkers! Bless scanning!
The phenomenon of "Reversal" and the "Flipping Point" is in some way related to the ensuring that the LODE and Re:LODE methods explore the way incremental changes in the technological, economic and political environment can produce a "state change".
State change
There is a double page spread in McLuhan and Parker's COUNTERBLAST that sets out a recent and invisible "state change" and that presents a shift of evolutionary significance.
Is this true?
