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Humans have experienced four successive eras of information processing and communication. In the first (perhaps pre-human), information was immediate and transitory; communication was limited to smell, gesture and simple vocalization (roars, grunts and purrs); and memory consisted of visual flashes and olfactory recollection. In the second, the ability to articulate was developed, and information became associated with a wider range of vocalizations. Communication was oral and aural, and information was stored in the wet wiring of the brain. A tremendous advance occurred nearly 100,000 years ago. Information became affixed to objects: the walls of caves, strands of fiber, and easily incised pieces of wood and bone. Communication became increasingly visual. Image and text became inextricably connected with physical media, soon including woven and stitched textiles, clay tablets, papyrus, parchment and paper. Information and physical media became in fact inseparable; and physical media became an information storage device as well. We are now entering the fourth great era of information processing, communication and storage. Modern technology has produced a fundamental schism of text from physical media. Information is now attached to electrons, as binary bits within the intricate lacework of the computer chip. Information in this form is no longer visual, oral, aural, gestural or olfactory. This is not without negative implication--physical media have survived for tens of thousands of years; while text in electronic media will last only so long as there is an electronic device to display it or printing device to print it, on traditional media, like paper. The outcome of this development is certainly not clear, although clearly worth considering. These ideas are woven into my work, and one can thus view my weavings in the following ways, among others: as an educational device to convey some very rudimentary aspects of the nature of contemporary information; as a conceptual device to explore fundamental shifts in how humans process and store information; as a storage device to preserve information about information for some future civilization; as a communication device to convey information to inhabitants of distant sun systems; or as simply an aesthetic device to make imagery out of text. But, without an understanding of the signification of the visual signs (i.e. text), it is all just imagery in any event.
W. Logan Fry |