Michelangelo’s David, the prototypic classic image of man (Adam) is written with tattoos, a metaphor for the postmodern expression of A New Alphabet, of iconographic language and the simultaneous disappearance and reconstitution of the human, the body and bodies of text in literature and art. Postmodern has several definitions, the simplest being a time designation beginning in the 1970s. Such designations are at best fuzzy edges. Postmodern originally referred to an early twentieth century school of architecture. From the design tradition, this term migrated into the critical discourse of all disciplines, to describe the rapidly changing milieu of the late-twentieth century.
Common postmodern culture attributes include: derivative or remediated work with ironic undertones, altered gender designations, a retreat from the humanist and modern agenda, and use of media: television, comics, electrified music, digital photography, magnetic disks, microprocessor chips, computerized information, enhanced data capture, data storage and data retrieval, robotics, microwave communication, lasers, multi-frequency radar, satellite surveillance, digital imaging, cyber systems, the genome and informatics.
David/Adam written with tattoos exemplifies postmodern’s derivative inclinations. This alphabet explores postmodern theories of embodiment and the evolving modality of postmodern expression. The iconic image of the human body from the tradition of figurative art is used to depict a new languages of discourse about theories of embodiment.
Current theorists of media and culture consistently claim a need for a new language to represent the postmodern. Artistic experimentation is leading this effort, as Rhizome.org demonstrates with Net Art News, an email bulletin that headlines a peer-reviewed cyber-art web site daily. Jean-Francois Lyotard with Discours, Figure (1971) and Lev Manovich with The Language of New Media (2002), are two examples of critique that propose new media’s language is iconographic. According to Manovich, the postmodern era grew out of the angst of modernism in the many avant-garde experiments throughout the 20the century, with works like The New Typography (Jan Tschichold, 1995), New Vision (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1932), Towards a New Architecture (Le Courbusier(1963), all which, describe new modes of expression. Gunther Kress in “Visual and Verbal Modes” delineates the role of cognition in the postmodern shift from narrative to display.
Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with Moustache Collage L.H.O.O. Q. (1919 & 1930) is an iconic example of postmodern’s smug defacing of the past. Replication in this book repeats postmodern’s dance with the incommensurable loss of the new. The postmodern lament is ‘whatever can be done has already been done before’. Even effacing the old masters has already been done. A New Alphabet engages this recurrent theme as theories of embodiment with the mixed-media of image and text in an alphabet of the subjective embodied text.
There is also a reciprocal relationship between codified screen formats and cognitive neural activity. Reciprocal cognitive responses in the body are determined by the mode of reading. This can be demonstrated with examples from film editing and video game usage. Current film editing uses faster pacing. The eye has to adjust more quickly to these image transitions. Paul Virilio’s theory of dromology considers the effects of accelerated speed on human culture and brain physiology due to changes in the speed of travel. The post modern body is acclimated to moving about at speeds of 30 – 90 hours per an hour, and accordingly the eye is trained to read a faster changing landscape. The formation of new cognitive habits is noted with repetitive performance of new digital activities such as: playing video games or reading text on video display screens.