JF Ptak Science Books Post 2204 History of Dots series
It is very odd how in the History of Stuff that clouds really were
never studied or named until the early 19th century–
not even the great classifiers reaching back to Aristotle did so.
Clouds are enormous and changing moving statuary,
and bring pain and joy and everything and nothing,
and still they escaped notice.
Even the invisible Winds have been named
and codified going back millennia.
It makes me think of things that we have control over now,
modifiers of expression, that have been basically the same
for decades of centuries or longer, and escape notice for improvement.
I was thinking of the markers/signifiers on the keypad I’m using right now.
The “.”/period, for example. Outside of “…” which signifies (mostly)
a trailing away or reticence of some sort,
the period has stayed the same for 500 years.
But not all sentences end in the same manner–
some come beautifully to a halt,
some struggle for existence and then die at the end,
others are seemingly both eternal and lifeless,
some find themselves at a screaming halt, and so on.
There must be different sorts of “.”‘s, no?
[Alexsandr Rodchenko, White Circle, 1918. Source: Radicalart.info, here]
There have been additions like we see in that last sentence “?”,
where a sentence is ended in a question or questioning.
And of course there’s the “!” and then combinations
of those two “?!”, “!?”, “??”, “!!”, and so on.
But the period seems to stay about the same.
Perhaps a color or three could be added, like a red period
when the sentence comes to a hot and firey end.
Or a period within a white circle to indicate variency or aloofness from its conclusion.
Perhaps a change in size, or several concentric rings,
could indicate coming to an end in exasperation,
or mensuration, or perspiration, or whatever other number of -ations there might be.
[Ivan Kljun, Red Light, 1923. Source: Radicalart.info, here]
The problem is then a person could use a keyboard for just the period–
same too could be said for the comma and the delivery of pause and effect.
And then again, if the sentence was written well enough,
a person wouldn’t need all of that extra cabbage at the end–
plus, well-written or not, the reader could supply their own ending.
So I guess we’ll just leave the period alone.
The “dot” however is another story.
It probably didn’t make a triumphant appearance until the printer’s tray,
and then stayed that way
for hundreds of years, half a millennium, until, suddenly, it was much more.
It became the point of pointilism, getting an enormous independent life in the hands of
Seurat and Pissaro in the 1880’s, and Signac and Van Gogh in the ’90’s, and Metzinger and Delauny in the ‘oughts,
and were filled with color and division and reflection and endless possibilities,
all dependent on where you stood and the proximity to the artwork.
And then in 1915 the dot became a point became a circle became an icon,
artwork again but without almost every other visual aspect of all the other painters who
ever painted before,
a beautiful simple place on a canvas by Kasimir Malevich.
That’s the image up at the top of the page, the Mona Lisa of Suprematism.
It came just a few years at about the end of the greatest revolutionary period of change
that has ever occurred to/with humans, from about 1885-1915, when almost everything became ‘modern”. Centuries/millennia of artwork became completely different with the pre-Impressionsts, and then again with Kandinsky who removed all representation of identifiable forms and replaced them with shapes and colors, and then with Malevich who removed almost all of those and wound up with his monumentally simple forms, a deceptively simple thing leading to great complexity.
Pixels are an entirely ‘nother thing.
