Scripta volant. Codes manent

The reasons behind a research study

Abstract

The contribution outlines the reasons that form the basis of a line of research that has long been the focus of the "Visual Communication Research Lab": the tradition of the new, as part of the broader SIDE Research Group at Vanvitelli University. This is open-ended, ongoing research, but we felt it could be a useful topic for shared reflection to inaugurate this new direction for Progetto grafico Journal. The contribution therefore, attempts to construct and synthesise a theoretical basis through which to engage in reflection on linear typographic writing, its destiny, its transformations in digital environments, the influences derived from the worlds of art and cyber experimentation, and its possible developments. A complex topic, but one that we believe to be central to contemporary debate, even if its interdisciplinary origins go unnoticed. It is not a semiological analysis of the “visuality of writing”. 

The assumptions of this research start from the premise that, regardless of nostalgic radicalism and personal convictions, digital technology has profoundly changed our relationship with literature: the written text, in its alphabetic and Western configuration, has lost its hegemony as a tool for accessing knowledge, whereas GenZ and those who follow are being educated in synthetic and immersive environments which, having abandoned the linearity of the typographic line, present themselves as hybrid systems in which writing – written-graphic, mobile, dynamic and interactive – constitute and make available reservoirs of information in continuous collision and reconfiguration 1. Magmatic environments in which alphabetic texts, signs, symbols, codes, images, and frames present themselves as new objectual, mythological realities, representing not so much content in itself as nodes of relationships in an interconnected ecosystem of thought. They are useful keys to unlocking worlds of knowledge which, having abandoned the codex form of the book, inhabit writing systems that are not necessarily alphabetic and which, to be investigated, mastered, or configured, require new forms of design but also education in learning.

A theoretical basis, not exhaustive, apparently far from the dimension of graphic design, which is instead assumed to be useful for those involved in design and training: to ask oneself what it means to approach modes of writing far from the codicological forms of the printed book or its reproduction in digital form; to refine tools for accessing content in new modes of teaching; to educate the mind to multidimensional structures of knowledge formalisation and, therefore, to move towards approaches to knowledge that, abandoning the linear and paratactic forms of the twentieth century, open up heuristic, multimodal, experimental and immersive paths which, in their being still to be codified, allow us to imagine new epistemological spaces.