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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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Populist mathematician John Mighton (who wrote a book called The Myth of Ability) on Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein initially believed that philosophy, like mathematics, could be reduced to logic. He felt that everyday language was too vague for philosophy. He inspired other philosophers to create artificial languages so you could talk about things precisely. From an old profile in Saturday Night Magazine
Laparoscopic surgeon and writer of odd-ball, award winning books, Leonard Shlain on the alphabet:
When beaded together on a horizontal line in a particular sequence these symbols became a decipherable code and made commonplace the ability to record and transfer information with relative ease.
An ideogram or hieroglyph is basically a picture that may contain multiple concepts all superimposed upon one another. The alphabet, on the other hand, strings out these concepts so that they become words in a sentence whose meaning depends on their linear sequence. Untangling the multiple ideas coiled within an ideographic image and converting them to linear code reinforces the belief that one thing follows another, and thus ever so surreptitiously alphabets impose causality upon the thinking process of those who use them. From Shlain's awkward, interesting book, Art and Physics
