Outside the window, there’s a hive of activity. There are flashes of \nblack and yellow, the sound of buzzing, the interweaving aerobatics of the paper \nwasps are complex as they maintain a personal airspace around the hive. \nI’m not going to get close enough to observe this, but I’ll take it as read that \neach individual wasp has taken a rest from making paper out of the fence and is \ngesturing with legs, antennae and mandibles to tell other wasps about stuff – \nyou know, whatever the vespal equivalent of office gossip is.<\/p>\n
The hive, analysed or viewed as a work of art, uses the technique of \nmultimodality<\/em>. In art, or at least that part of the art that \ncommunicates, there are five modes of communication: visual, aural, \ngestural, spatial<\/em> and linguistic<\/em>. Visual refers to shapes \nand colours that you can actually see, aural refers to sounds and music that you \ncan actually hear, gestural means gestures such as body language and \ninterpretive dance, spatial refers to the placement of objects within the \nartwork itself and linguistic refers to language, either written or spoken.<\/p>\n There is some overlap between the modes. For example, the spoken word \nis both linguistic and aural, since it uses language but you have to hear it to \nmake use of it. Writing uses language and is thus in the linguistic mode, \nbut the format of the text is visual, because if I change the font I \ncan change the effect of the words<\/span>, and spatial because words are ordered \nin paragraphs, and you can have inserted quotes in separate text boxes.<\/p>\n Even if there is some overlap, art or writing in the digital age can be \nintentionally<\/em> multimodal. Have a look at\n\nthis famous article by Lee Martin<\/a>. There are three modes \nin operation here: linguistic, because the article has to make some sense (even \nif its analogies and metaphors are just insane); visual, because there’s a \npicture of a wasp up there and the letters are in a nice serif font as \ndetermined by your browser settings first, then the webpage; and spatial, \nbecause of the way the story is laid out on the page. You can add another \nmode to that, aural, if you’re using a screenreader of some type.<\/p>\n Not all modes are equal however. Or, to put it another way, all modes \nare equal but some are more equal than others. For example, up there I \nused the word ‘hive<\/i>‘ to describe where the paper wasps were doing there \nart. If I had put a picture up there of their ‘place of business’ you \nmight have used the word ‘hive’, too, to describe it. In fact, and more \nprecisely<\/i>, it’s not a hive, it’s a colony<\/i>. The linguistic mode \nis more precise and, since language functions to communicate ideas, it leaves \nless room for interpretation on the part of the viewer or reader, and thus less \nroom for inaccuracies. Of course, the linguistic mode is not as emotive \nas, say, the aural mode, where music and sound effects can convey an emotion.<\/p>\n Many of our activities can be multimodal, too. Some friends and I \nvisited the Mail Exchange<\/a> on \nFriday the 13th <\/sup>and there constructed a group artistic project with \nall five modes in operation. We talked, made gestures, seated ourselves \naround a table that was in a specific position in the pub. The\nFluxus movement in art<\/a> suggested \nthat we humans make art all the time, and this was our little coterie’s \ncontribution to art. You could see it as a reaction to the digitalisation \nand virtualisation of art, and since it was at a specific time (or date) and \nplace, it also satisfies \nWalter Benjamin’s ideas<\/a> on authenticity. It has an aura that was not \nonly irreproducible, but was as effective as ten schooners could make it.<\/p>\n As yet multimodality is limited to the five modes listed above, but there is \na potential for even more modes to be create in the future. The first one \nwould touch on the other of the five traditional senses, which we could call the\nolfactory<\/em> mode. One example of this occurs in Gentleman Jol \nand th Red Queen<\/em> by Lois McMaster Bujold. The Cetagandans use very \nsophisticated forms of art and perfumes are a part of that.<\/p>\n I have no way to reproduce the olfactory mode of the wasp colony, so you’re \nspared the whiff of geraniums – for now.<\/p>\n A more topical possible mode is viral, <\/em>but I don’t know how it \nwould be expressed. <\/p>\n Improvements in virtual reality may add other modes of expression, such as \nforcing gestural responses by direct control peoples’ movements.<\/p>\n Fiscal<\/em>, wherein the movement of money is not just in trade for the \nart, but is part of the art itself.<\/p>\n Meteorological<\/em>; if I write ‘It was a dark \nand stormy night’<\/span> and it actually is.<\/em><\/p>\n Vespal. <\/em> But you’ll have to ask the wasps about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Outside the window, there’s a hive of activity. There are flashes of black and yellow, the sound of buzzing, the interweaving aerobatics of the paper wasps are complex as they maintain a personal airspace around the hive. I’m not going to get close enough to observe this, but I’ll take it as read that each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bawrt-2004"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bawrt2004.captlychee.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Aral was getting more and more impatient with this ghem ass, and as I was \ntrying to decode the most recent, he finally said, \u2018Just give me the damned \nthing,\u2019 twitched it out of my hands, and took it into the lav. Where he \nproceeded to amend it with, er, his own personal scent mark.\u201d
\n<\/q>\n