Christian Mosbaek Johannessen - The Materiality of Writing: A Trace Making Perspective

CHRISTIAN MOSBK JOHANNESSEN AND THEO VAN LEEUWEN

Part I
Writing and Reading

AURLIE LAGARRIGUE AND MARIEKE LONGCAMP

TIM INGOLD

PAUL J. THIBAULT

Part II
Bodies, Tools and Materials

BRODY L. NEUENSCHWANDER

LIEVE CORNIL

RAYMOND LUCAS

KARINE BOUCHY

Part III
Manual and Digital Traces

GUNHILD KVLE

CHRISTIAN MOSBK JOHANNESSEN AND THEO VAN LEEUWEN

Part IV
Kinds of Traces

GIORGIA AIELLO

ANNE LVLAND AND PL REPSTAD

MAHDIYEH MEIDANI

ELISE SEIP TNNESSEN

Christian Mosbk Johannessen and Theo van Leeuwen

In the child, both writing and drawing develop from what I call the fundamental graphic act, the making of traces on a surface that constitute a progressive record of movement [] The movement of the tool over the surface is both felt and seen, The muscle-joint-skin kinesthesis is emphasized by orthodox sensory psychology, and the visual kinesthesis is emphasized by my perceptual psychology. But these are transient awarenesses. The seeing of a progressive record of the movement of the tool is lasting. There is a track of trail of the movement, like the afterimage of a firebrand whirled in the darkness, except that it is permanenta stroke, a stripe, or a streak, in short, a trace.

Gibson (1979: 275)

If ever extra-terrestrial xeno-zoologists (alien biologists) were to look down upon the Earth from close orbit as preparation for a research expedition, they would notice that terrestrial species do not exist in a pregiven environment which they just happen to occupy and which was there before them. Rather, terrestrial organisms have co-evolved with their environments and re-arranged them to suit their needs in a process known as niche construction (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003). Our aliens would observe termites collectively assembling very large structures from grains of sand glued together with excrement, structures that serve not only as shelter and food stores for the termites but also, at a metabolic level, as thermo-regulation for the entire colony. On a larger scale they would see beavers collectively building dams and turning entire streams of water into pools for convenient fishing, flooding large areas of woodland in the process. But above all, they would notice that one bipedal mammal speciesHomo sapiens sapienshas had a massively larger impact on shaping the planetary ecology than any other species. They would notice that in some places tens of millions of humans live together in urban colony ecologies that spread over a significant portion of the Earths landmasses and that only few surfaces outside these colonies have been left untouched by their activities. And maybe the more behaviourally inclined among our alien scientists would puzzle over our habit of marking practically every single surface of our urban ecologies (our road networks, the insides and outside of our dwellings, every cultural artefact, including our own bodies) with pigment patterns. What use might such behaviour be?

We beg forgiveness for this frivolous thought exercise. It does, however, serve the purpose of looking at our environment with new eyes, Graphic tracesenduring marks left in or on a solid surface by continuous movement (Ingold, 2007: 43)permeate our existence to such a degree that we take them for granted and tend to understand them narrowly in terms of the very specific and specialised practices in which they are embedded: whether as letters in writing, numbers and symbols in mathematics, drawing and painting in art, diagrams in engineering, logos in marketing and so on. In other words, we tend to miss the bigger picture: that humans are fundamentally a trace-making species and have been since the Middle Stone Age (Malafouris, 2013: 181) and that all graphic traces, regardless of the cultural practices they serve, have commonalities.