Thebes of the seven gates

Giovanni Lussu

Thebes of the seven gates

The school today, by Roberto Pieracini

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Seeing a different horizon? 01 Morphologies

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Isiaurbino 2013

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Save the children!

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www.isiaurbino.net

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Traces

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Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters

04 Booklets Translations Game-books Routes 1 and More routes

Giovanni Lussu Thebes of the seven gates

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52 52 60 2 61 68

Wer baute das siebentorige Theben? In den Büchern stehen die Namen von Königen. Haben die Könige die Felsbrocken herbeigeschleppt? Und das mehrmals zerstörte Babylon Wer baute es so viele Male auf? In welchen Häusern des goldstrahlenden Limas wohnten die Bauleute? Wohin gingen an dem Abend, wo die Chinesische Mauer fertig war die Maurer? Das große Rom ist voll von Triumphbögen. Wer errichtete sie? Über wen triumphierten die Cäsaren? Hatte das vielbesungene Byzanz nur Paläste für seine Bewohner? Selbst in dem sagenhaften Atlantis brüllten in der Nacht, wo das Meer es verschlang Die Ersaufenden nach ihren Sklaven.

05 Narrations Arno Schmidt 73 The horror! 80 Remember, my beloved 90 Semasiographic writing 94 Electric ants 100 The song of the morrow 104

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06 The talisman Pasta with sardines 1 and 2 110 Synsemic caponata 120 Another caponata 124

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Engraved, suspended

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A concise history

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Der junge Alexander eroberte Indien. Er allein? Cäsar schlug die Gallier. Hatte er nicht wenigstens einen Koch bei sich? Philipp von Spanien weinte, als seine Flotte untergegangen ­­­war. Weinte sonst niemand? Friedrich der Zweite siegte im Siebenjährigen Krieg. Wer siegte außer ihm? Jede Seite ein Sieg.

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Fa¯nyì

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Books, books, books

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Wer kochte den Siegesschmaus? Alle zehn Jahre ein großer Mann. Wer bezahlte die Spesen?

11 Typography? ... so it goes on... 181

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Index of names

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Published writings

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So viele Berichte. So viele Fragen.

Bertolt Brecht, Svendborger Gedichte (1926-39)

Set in Info Office (Ole Schäfer and Erik Spiekermann, 1998) English translation by Eurotrad snc, Urbino

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[7] The School today The much desired School, the University, was born in Milan twenty years ago, in 1993, the Polytecnic of Milan. Third Faculty of Architecture, Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design. The impetus to create it was provided by professionals and graphic artists, who also participated in it directly. A few years earlier, with the First Public Utility Graphics Biennale, held in the town of Cattolica in the Romagna region on the border with the Marche, a historic experiment came to a conclusion, the result of which enabled new generations of graphic artists to make their profession overlap with a need for responsible social communication. The communication project was aimed at citizens, with a strong desire for direct participation. The proposal was then refused by the consensus politics that found the advertising agencies to be definitely more suitable tools for preserving their own existence. The excitement of the moment can still be felt in the “Graphic Project Charter” presented in 1989 and signed by a large number of professionals. Now, many years later, we need to pay some attention to the consequences of what was sketched out at the time, and check out the present-day situation: academies, universities and private schools have introduced training courses in graphic art and visual communication. The ISIAs (Higher Institutes for Artistic Industries) continue along the same route. The Graphic Project Charter showed clearly what to do, but not how to do it. The Arts Award for Communication Design held in 2012 in Urbino presented for the first time the actual substance of the training in Italy. This appears inadequate, stationary, and constantly seeking “creativity” and good ideas. However, in this state of “creative” enthusiasm, the “sense of the discipline”, its methodology and its research, are still missing. Our history, or the route that, with the passing of time, has brought us to this point, is quite clear. What is absolutely not clear is the depth and the preciseness of the subjects, the objective responsibility of the training, the ethics and the culture of a profession that still moves between pleasant aesthetics and the recycling of the déjà-vu. The profession seems unable to get beyond what is offered by the available sophisticated programs on hand for everybody, and unable to find a clear relationship for itself with these. At the same time, its role within society and in relation to other disciplines does not appear well defined. Training courses, without a culture that is not only internal to the profession but driving the project, remain empty and an end unto themselves. The last refuge seems to the individualism of graphic design by famous artists. In this clearly rather uncomfortable scenario, Giovanni Lussu points to and follows a completely different path taking us through the world of visual communication and investigating it from the inside. ii

As one who has long been engaged in the training and the culture of the profession – the most significant books published in Italy are by him or edited by him – he presents in this volume the whole of his career as a teacher, and his non-proposal for education. Linear and involving civil commitment – more so, even that a commitment to training – it is closely linked to his profession as an artisan of graphic art. As director of the Urbino ISIA I am delighted with this publication, which carries a different view of the profession and will, I am sure, help to make the whole world of training more responsible. Roberto Pieracini Direttore ISIA

[10] z There is a certain imbalance, between how school has always been alien to me and the large amount of time I have spent impersonating the enemy, meaning the teacher. Not so much in the primary school, but my aversion was very strong from the first year of middle school to the couple of years I attended the Architecture Faculty in Rome, and the few months spent at what was then the Higher Course in Graphic Art at Urbino, always strictly with very low grades. Of course I made some friends who still attend school happily but it seems to me that in all these schools I learnt very little and I consider myself, in fact, to be self-taught (but not, I hope, in the manner of the man in Sartre’s La Nausée, who adjusted to a new culture in strict alphabetical sequence. I would prefer to be more like Ekalavya in the Mahabharata, who was rejected by his teacher Drona on account of his low caste and withdrew into the forest to learn by himself how to shoot with a bow and arrow, eventually overtaking even Arjuna). The little mathematics I know I learned certainly on my own, in later adult life, but I have the impression that I even learned more Latin in those periods when I studied something on my own account, rather than in the eight years I suffered it at school. z The list of teaching posts I have held, in fact, points to a quite substantial activity: ISIA, Rome, 1982-86; Montecelio Institute, 1989-93; Milan Polytechnic, 1993-2009; La Sapienza, Rome, 1996-2000, 2003-06; Roma Tre, 1999-2000; Master in Communication and information technologies, University of Bologna, 1999-03; Master in Photographic representation of architecture and environment, La Sapienza, 2001-02; Master in Paper and Multi-media Publishing, University of Bologna, 2001-10; Bari Polytechnic, 2002-08; ISIA, Urbino, 2006-07; University of Sassari, 2009-11; for around 50 years in all, plus an indefinite number of seminars, courses, workshops and laboratories, from Cordenons to Ariccia, to Malta and to Rio de Janeiro. And there is no doubt I have been lucky: I have always enjoyed myself reasonably well everywhere, and sometimes even very well, and I have had the great privilege of being around a large number of young people, one generation after another, in rotation. z Of course, I have never lived off my earnings as a teacher. I have always been first of all a graphic designer, or a communication designer or whatever you want to call it. And I have always been a craftsman, properly registered in the Chamber of Commerce (and industry, agriculture and craft trades) for over forty years now. When, rather reluctantly, I took part in a competition for a university chair as associated professor, and when I then

won that competition, I preferred not to take up the post. The reason for this – besides the fact that I had never got over my mistrust of institutions – was because I would have had to give up my identity as a free craftsman (incompatible in this system with that of a university teacher), which gave me a lot of satisfaction (and I really do not understand yearning of many colleagues to be recognized as “professionals” – and this even after Richard Sennett!), in order to take on the identity of an employee, however highly respected, which I found less appealing. z The intention of this notebook is, firstly, to talk about my varied and complex – and even contradictory – work experience; it does not claim to give instructions on didactic methods, nor does it offer any strict, coherent method of teaching. However, this does not prevent me from expounding, as a craftsman, some brief considerations, even in a jumbled way, haphazardly, while taking for granted all the declarations of principle (I don’t like examinations, I don’t like marks, I don’t like teacher’s meetings, etc.). [11] z To start with, I think it is misleading and even harmful, to require students to do simulated cases (a trademark for a hypothetical company, an image for a possible campaign, etc.) or to redesign existing cases. The raison d’être of a graphic designer’s profession is the presence of an interlocutor – the client who remunerates him or her – and the design is first of all a mediation, or a translation of the client’s requirements into visual languages. The teacher can certainly not pretend to be the client, and avoiding the relationship with the client only feeds the delusions of omnipotence that are often lurking inside designers. The development of a critical awareness of life (for which, first of all, historical knowledge is necessary), and a wideranging knowledge of what is happening in the outside world are quite another thing, and they are essential. The time spent at school is the only time, before work or the laborious search for it, that can be devoted to pure experimentation, and this must be taken advantage of as much as possible. In a school of design there should not be courses consisting of so-called “frontal” lessons (in which the teacher stands at the front of the whole class). Everything that can be found in books should be studied by the students on their own and afterwards, of course, they should discuss it and experiment with it. The teacher’s function should be to stimulate, offer consultancy, propose and discuss. In a field of such rapid transformations as the communication field, the essential thing is flexibility, the readiness to adapt quickly to new situations – something we often hear people say but rarely find. What we need to teach is the ability to assume and integrate knowledge. This ability is obviously proportional to the quality and structure of the basic knowledge.

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z But what are the needs which design schools have to respond to? What are the questions asked by the society we live in? One case that I now consider to be symbolic is the exhibition of posters for the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Italian Unity, which took place in May 2011 at Civitanova Marche, in the context of the Cartacanta initiative (many of the posters were reproduced in a subsequent edition of “Abitare” magazine). A hundred and fifty posters, therefore, created by the same number of Italian graphic artists, or communication designers, and the expression – we might well imagine, given the skills of the participants – of a category of operators that presumes itself to be important, at an important event. And what does this category express? A reflection on the national identity, presumed or otherwise, on the occasion of a fairly debatable anniversary? A discussion, an opinion? A viewpoint? A declaration of patriotism? A blistering criticism of the unification process? Some kind of meditation on the visual traditions of Italy? On how they have come together or otherwise in modern graphic art? A dream, a premonition? In other words, some content that would justify such a vast mobilization? Nothing of the kind. The one hundred and fifty designers drew, without a care in the world and each in his or her own way, the number 150. These events, as we, as graphic artists or designers, know, are eagerly awaited because they finally allow one’s “creativity” full rein and allow one to escape every so often from the fetters of daily toil; they are fairly similar to children exchanging picture cards: “if you’ve got that one, look what I’ve got”. However, a hundred and fifty children would without doubt have done more interesting things, and certainly more amusing ones. What’s more, these figures in the graphics, from the pure visual or pseudo-artistic point of view they are restricted to, all appear cleaned up, all mercilessly produced or anyway processed on a computer using commercial application programs, all worked over and reworked dozens of times, without anything of that lumpiness, those palimpsests of often dramatic superimpositions and cross-breeding that are such a part of today’s visual universes. In brief, they are decidedly futile. And so we ask ourselves: what school do we need in order to be able to produce these images? The answer is easy: we do not need any school. [12] z I am unconditionally in favour of all forms of individual expressiveness, being convinced that anybody can profitably engage in them: jam labels, embroidered table mats, wood engraving, painting for leisure or for gain, little machines cobbled together in an amateurish way, as Galileo did as a child, and also cooking, singing, gardening and the numerous forms of DIY, and finally posters, leaflets, book covers and trademarks – or “logos”, call them what you will – which I, too, have done a lot of. For all these wonderful activities there are, if one wants, iv

excellent manuals and thousands of courses and agreeable opportunities for joining clubs. There is certainly no need for university degrees, three-year or five-year and maybe a master’s or a doctorate: just as there is certainly no need to draw the number 150. And there is no need for most of what comprises the current graphic art of today: company images, editorial graphics and commercial graphics of all kinds are all activities for which, unlike what happens for an agronomist or for an electrical engineer, circumstantial knowledge, which schools cannot give (the information on the traditions and varieties of the specific field of activity, on the place and type of structure one is operating in, on the specific needs of the client, etc.) is far more important than the knowledge needed of graphics or design. This basic knowledge, if you think about it, is limited to very little in the exercise of current graphic design: some notions of typography (and graphic artists have very little of this, and none at all up to a few years ago), a sprinkling of visual perception (primeval and often badly digested, from the amount of white writing on a yellow background that we see all around the place) and not much else. And then the fact that these graphic products are created in one way or the other is usually quite irrelevant. And in fact, with the widespread use of computers, a lot of things that graphic artists did before are now done by those who need them, which is precisely the reason why computers are widespread. z Corporatists, or those who would like to be professionals and who therefore tackle commercial graphic art in its most trite and depressing forms, appear to be scandalized by this desire for a do-it-yourself approach; but at this rate, if we start by being scandalized, we cannot but finish up, explicitly or implicitly, by trying to limit access to this activity, and in this we cross over into the pathetic and slide down into the deviant. Even the pretensions to formal mannered hegemony of the much more authoritative international style have now finally and definitively fallen into decay (apart from some last shreds, like our unfortunate railway signals), in the face of the sacrosanct contemporary eclecticism; that is all we need – to find we have again got some Pius IX-type “Syllabus of Errors” promulgated by a corporation of so-called professionals. z However, if graphic designers, or communication designers, are not very important, visual communication certainly is. It is more and more essential, not only in its transmission but in the very elaboration of knowledge, and all the more if we begin to assume, as now appears inescapable, a synsemic approach to written communication; this means no longer first the text and then the images around it, but new syntheses that might activate complex neuronal relationships and multiply the ability to assume and integrate knowledge. Digital technology seems to be able to bring to completion, and start again on, the many things that have been experimented for centuries and millennia; and not only in teaching, in popularizing and in research, but in the participation of human beings in the social complexity they live in, as Otto Neurath wished for with his Isotype, and in their general progress towards future challenges.

z Of course, in order to be able to face such a responsibility we have to start from the beginning, from a primary school that allows children to develop the intrinsic potentials for graphic representation that are characteristic of our species. It would then be nice if the middle school were really able to offer an abundant supply of the base that is so often lacking in young people who arrive in higher education; and lots of other things would be needed as well, such as a better society.

different, being neither graphic artists nor communication designers)? Perhaps the present ISIAs could in some way, because of their unusual history and their organization, comprise the core of a new development. Before anything else it would be necessary to reunite what, alas, has been separated and artificially put in contrast – the scientific approach on the one side and the so-called artistic one on the other.

But as far as specific university design courses are concerned, we can today retrospectively conclude that they have not started well, for the very fact that they were activated in architecture faculties. Even product design might have been better developed in engineering courses; but for communication, architecture has perhaps been the worst environment. In the historical development of architectural design there is not much that is useful for communication; in fact, there is nothing at all, and it may be time to take a fresh, in-depth look at the by now tired fallacies that link architecture, product design and graphic design on the basis of the Bauhaus experience and its emigration to America. The presumptuous, empty typographical practice of this school would on its own be enough to delete it from the list of important references for communication today: the fact that it claimed to make visual communication without consolidated typographical knowledge is decidedly upsetting.

z This new type of metagraphic designer must certainly have a good basic mathematical knowledge, without which we can understand very little not just about science but about the whole universe of today and tomorrow; only this will enable them to dialogue and interact with the different fields of knowledge that make up the world. If this knowledge were dealt with correctly, experimentally and from a design point of view, we would see that anyone can acquire it, and that it is also fun and really creative. But with today’s graphic artists and designers it is no use discussing these things: they are absolutely unable to argue about anything, for the simple reason that they do not know anything and do not do anything to find out about anything, and they cannot therefore come up with any opposing ideas except prejudices, and then silence, and then paralysis. Perhaps it is the teachers, rather than the aspiring students, who should take an entry test to get into these schools.

[13]

At the same time we should know and experiment consciously with the variety of visual languages. And, like Thomson and Thompson, I would go even further: along with mathematics, we should also do figure drawing, maybe not so much the traditional academic nudes or still lifes, but the representation of figures – meaning knowing how to see and render and clearly trace a physical environment, a topographical, geographical space, a facial expression, a relationship between objects and between people.

z The positioning of graphic design in architecture faculties has given rise to the worst aspect – formalism, intrinsic in that tradition’s notion of “composition”. This means that the final configuration of the communication artwork, instead of being triggered off by an analysis of the message, as one would hope, tends to be shaped by starting from considerations – formal ones, in fact – that are external to it, as in the practice of most of the so-called rationalist movement (which did not actually have much that was rational in it). We cannot now expect very much, substantially, from university courses in communication design, and if they were closed it would not cause very much damage, either for graphic art and certainly not for the national economy; all requirements, whether real or presumed, would be met more or less in the same way. It would be much more profitable if semesters could be set up on visual communication, which would today be of use to everyone, not just to future architects in architecture faculties but also in any other degree course, both of a so-called humanistic type and of a so-called scientific type, so that each person could do best what he or she needs to do.

z Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!

The original texts of my instructions for creating exercises and practical tests are always marked like this paragraph.

The comments of authors of exercises and tests are marked in this way.

[14] z However, to tackle the immense present and future challenges referred to above, and to ensure the management and the evolution of this complex situation, specialized operators would be useful. How can these complex communication planners be trained (and perhaps we should at this point call them something

01 Morphologies The primordial plant (Urpflanze) will be the most wonderful creation in the world. Nature itself will envy me. With this model and the key to understanding it, one can invent an v

infinite number of plants, ones that must be consequent – meaning that, even if they do not exist, they could exist. They are not shadows or poetic and painterly illusions, but they possess an inner truth and necessity. This same principle could be applied to every other aspect of life as well. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Results of the program that generates all possible snails, even those that “if they do not exist, they could exist”. The program itself, therefore, is the ur-snail, the primordial snail. In 1982, my friend and colleague Sergio Vezzali, who had already been teaching at the ISIA in Rome for some years, suggested that I should hold the Morphology course at that school (which now, as then, deals essentially with product design) and he introduced me to it. I had never taught and nor had I ever thought of doing so; I was almost forty years old, and because of my general lack of confidence in scholastic institutions I put up some resistance. The prospect had some stimulating aspects, however, since it would allow me to give rein to certain impulses that had long been repressed. As I have already recounted in my La lettera uccide, there was a whole field of research, reflections and considerations that had interested me for many years. Following Intuitive geometry by David Hilbert (whom I had known since I was a boy) I had collected some unusual texts on geometry, such as Haresh Lalvani’s Transpolyhedra, Keith Critchlow’s Order in space, Polyhedra primer by Peter and Susan Pearce and, also by Peter Pearce, Structure in nature is a strategy for design, which already went right to the heart of the matter. And there was also Growth and form by D’Arcy Thompson, Tools for thought by Conrad Waddington, a series of texts on the area that was then defined as structuralist, and the clever anticipation by Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, which contained that very same keyword, coined by Goethe and explicitly taken up by Propp. I was by then already a determined reader, following an old suggestion by my first mentor in photography Enzo Ragazzini, of the review “Scientific American”, in its former Italian edition as “Le scienze”. With the aid of a very expert acquaintance, I was also starting to understand what computers were and how they could be programmed. It was not very clear what Morphology was supposed to be (a term, as I recollect, coined by Goethe at the end of the eighteenth century, with some possibility of it deriving from proto-Romantic irrationalism) in a design school. I put together a course syllabus based generally on a mathematical approach to the morphogenesis of natural forms which, for me, who was not particularly interested in product design, might have been identical in a graphic arts course, and I went into the school. I was immediately very lucky to find myself in a class with an exceptionally motivated, and therefore exceptionally critical, group of students, a few of whom I then remained close friends with, right up to today. I confess that I enjoyed myself: I used to take in sea relics vi

collected over the years (stones, bones and roots) and I blew soap bubbles into trellises that I had built by welding copper rods, and the students used their ingenuity to create projects and little machines. [15] However, I was in danger of having a particularly violent traumatic experience the first time I had to do examinations: in my aversion to school, I considered exams, from which I myself had suffered horribly, as a cruel evil, and to have to inflict such an abomination on others seemed to me impossible. Fortunately, the examination candidates were considerate; they accompanied me gently to the altar of sacrifice and, laughing and joking, they made the event as far as possible bearable. Meanwhile, I had got to know the mathematics teachers Giordano Bruno (who was to become director of the ISIA thirty years later) and Angelo Gilio, both pupils of the great probabilist Bruno De Finetti. Together with them I had signed the application for the first computers in the school – two small Commodore 64s, among the very first home computers of those years. Before buying them, the scientific committee had to meet specifically to discuss if they might obstruct the full deployment of “creativity”, as some teachers feared, or not. And together with them we quickly asked for a meeting with Andries Van Onck, the Dutch designer who came from the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, and who arrived at the ISIA in 1984, I think, to hold a course. I had appreciated it very much when, a few years before, I had come across his written piece Metadesign that appeared in a famous issue of the review “Edilizia moderna” dedicated to design (no. 83, 1965), which dealt with meta-design procedures for generating forms on a mathematical basis. We were hoping, along with him, to be able to start up programs and research but Van Onck, alas, had left behind those more juvenile ideas of his and, still urged on by the waves of cultural anthropology of the previous era, he made us a speech that was certainly inspired and impressive, in which he proclaimed the two new buzzwords, Myth and Ritual. Right, one of the many little “telephonic” drawings, actually done in an attempt to survive the interminable teaching-staff meetings, which I still associate indelibly with ISIA. [16] Anyway, with the two Commodores we did a lot of things, all distinctly experimental: the two Alberi (Trees) and Chiocciole (Snails) programs by Luigi Bonessio, in retrospective decidedly pioneering, the simulation of the starfish preying on the snail with the black turban by Francesco Perilli (from an article in “Scientific American”, as were many other things), the cycloid and epicycloid dynamics of Susanna Quaranta and Giovanni Callori, then various little Martians, applications of the Game of Life by John Horton Conway etc. In that same period, on an Apple II (or rather, on one of its clones), I was trying, as a concrete work opportunity, to create a parametric star – an extension in various directions of the star devised by Michelangelo for the pavement in Campidoglio

square (Il caso della stella a dodici punte [The case of the twelve-pointed star], in La lettera uccide, pp. 84-97). Below, the parametric star (ur-star). Variables: a) relationship between the axes of the circumscribed ellipse; b) number of points; c) number of concentric “rings”; d) value of the exponent in the ellipse equation. The one designed by Michelangelo is repeated four times in the third line. Parametric trees. Variables: a) verticality index; relationship between the length of a branch and that of the branch of origin; b) angle of the first “fork”; c) number of branches at each “fork”. The presence of pseudo-random functions guarantees that, for each group of variables, each time the program is run it generates a different example of the same species. [17] The school was not very interested in this research: they were anxiously awaiting the purely applicational CAD programs, and several times they tried to make me see that I could have done something more useful. In addition, relations between me and the school began to show cracks and the appointment as chairman of the scientific committee of August Morello, an authoritative exponent of, to me, not very congenial Milanese design and a rather autocratic person himself, finally induced me to leave the school, but not without having first developed a rather difficult and ambitious syllabus for the following year’s course. However, the story does not end here. My syllabus for the ISIA Morphology course for the academic year 1986-87. Looking at it today, I do not think even four years would have been enough to carry it out.

appeared in “Le scienze”), and I had meanwhile read something about Metafont, the parametric printing program that supplied the fonts for TEX. And I was in a polytechnic! Where it was raining mathematics! As soon as I could I had a long conversation with someone who had been pointed out to me as a great expert in computer matters on the degree course. I set out my convictions to him, I told him of my experience at the ISIA in Rome, I proposed some striking scenarios – I played all my cards. But the expert remained unmoved, like stone: I explained patiently that the game was over, and that software was designed only in the United States and that we, in Europe, ought to deal exclusively with applications and avoid pursuing uneconomical fantasies. I then agreed with Anceschi to organize a meeting with the mathematics teachers on the degree course, who were certainly very kind, but not at all interested (“tell us what you need, and we’ll do it for you”). I tried again, with a teacher who was apparently a little more prepared to listen. We fixed a meeting, but she didn’t turn up; later on, she said that she had had more urgent commitments and had unfortunately forgotten about it. I understood then that there was nothing to be done, or at any rate, that I would not be able to do it. Time passed: years passed – thirteen of them. In 2006, I was asked by the same Polytechnic (where I had continued to teach in the meantime) to hold a course in type design. Initially, I would not have wanted to do it because typography, which I had been dealing with on a large scale for a long time, was starting to appear more and more futile and affected, but then it seemed to me the right opportunity at the right time. With the very decisive contribution of Michele Patanè (an enthusiast on the subject) and of Luciano Perondi, and with interventions by Paolo Mazzetti, Giorgio Caviglia and Antonio Cavedoni, we did the first course in parametric typography (pp. 171, 178). [26]

On the following pages, the material I gave the students starting, I think, in 1984 (along with mountains of photocopies from “Le scienze”). [25] Years later, in 1993, when the Industrial Design course at Milan Polytechnic was introduced, I found myself proposed by Giovanni Anceschi straight away to be a teacher on that course. However, although I had not in the meantime had any particular opportunities for further experimentation, and despite the fact that the advent of the Macintosh had made programming less straightforward, I was more and more convinced that that mathematics – and not just for design in general but for graphic art in particular – was the complementary, inescapable path for tackling the challenges of tomorrow (meaning what is now today). For example, we had had to do a layout with Daniele Turchi for a physics book, for work, in the TEX typesetting system by Donald Knuth (a name that was already well known to me in 1977 because of an extraordinary article on algorithms that

02 Save the children! Hand-in-hand with the mathematics on the previous pages, there was another question to deal with, as further evidence of the inseparability of the whole. This is a story I have told and these are the pictures that I have shown many times. The facts of the matter are written in more detail in my La lettera uccide (pp. 48-57) and, in a slightly different version, in “Linegrafica” no. 296, March 1995. It is enough to mention here that it was a so-called “drawn poetry” workshop that took place in a fourth elementary class in Rome Municipality in the context of the local authority libraries’ initiative “Il gioco della rima” (“The rhyme game”). I spent five days in class, with seven librarians assisting me. Large sheets of paper (50 x 35 cm), large brushes, liquid paints. Day 1: slide-show of the most varied kinds of scripts – images prepared for the occasion which for many years had comprised vii

the core of my introductory lessons. Arabic and oriental calligraphies, Maya and Aztec texts, Indian and Ethiopian books, African and Eskimo writings. On Day 2 the children were asked to produce invented writings, and on Day 3, to write their own name. On Days 4 and 5 we aimed at the great final objective: to write words in forms that would represent their meaning. The children threw themselves into it wholeheartedly! A perfunctory analysis would suggest that this approach to writing is possible for the very children in question, around 9 years of age, because they already have a reasonable control of reading and writing, but these skills are not yet automated for them. Here too, letters are certainly symbols that, when grouped together, convey precise meanings, but they are in some way disconnected from their phonetic correspondence. Compositional procedures – implicit rhetorics – are here substantially visual; they avoid the Aristotelian paradigm of writing as a simple transcription of verbal discourse, and they escape what Roy Harris has defined as the “tyranny of the alphabet”.

The 100 slides I presented to the students (most of which were the same ones I had shown to the fourth elementary-class children of the previous chapter) were divided into 10 sections, interrelated as in the diagram in the illustration above. We started from Plato’s Phaedrus, to finish with the icons of operating systems which were then appearing on the scene of digital images, passing by way of Chinese and Mixtec writings, Ludovico degli Arrighi, Gottfried Leibniz, Lewis Carroll, Stefan Themerson, Raymond Queneau and John Horton Conway, I left the students a duodecimo in A4, with the list of all the slides accompanied by comments, bibliography and various small models. On these two pages and the two following ones, the duodecimo plus cover. That collection of images, although continually modified and adapted to different situations, was then the basis of almost all my subsequent introductions to writing (see, for example, pp. 40-43), both in my own courses and in independent interventions. [36]

A suggestion for a richer way of teaching writing. Save the children!, as Lu Xun writes at the end of his terrible Diary of a madman. Tree on page 33 as it was being done. From page 29: Silvia, Stella, Federico, Alfio, Clean, Dark, Volcano, Wind. [34] 03 Traces

I had been repeatedly asked by Paola Trombin, then director of the Graphic art Department, for a seminar at the European Design Institute (IED) in Rome, but I had a strong resistance towards it, as to any other private school. After a few negotiations I had yielded: I would be paid a little more than usual, and my fee would be devolved to Médecins sans Frontières (so I would be doing a charitable action) and, in addition, my intervention would then be published by the school. And so it came to pass. With the title La grafica è scrittura: una lezione (Graphic art is writing: a lesson) an A4 pamphlet of 24 pages plus cover came out, all in four colours, with layout by me, and with text also in English (very well translated by a British student at the school, Karen Le Marquand), and printed at my request by Graffiti, the printer that was starting to collaborate in that same period with Stampa Alternativa on my book series “Scritture” (Writings). [40]

In 1988 a series of seminars was held at the Urbino ISIA, promoted by the AIAP (Italian Association for Visual Communication Design), and organized by Gianfranco Torri, who was then the Association’s vice-chairman. Extracts or summaries of these meetings were later published in a special edition of “Quaderni Aiap” (no. 13-14, 1989) with the title Grafica; la cultura del progetto (Graphic art; the design culture), supplemented with other materials. Taking part in the initiative were many of the “Cattolica group”, who had created the exhibition Propaganda e cultura: indagine sul manifesto di pubblica utilità dagli anni Settanta ad oggi (Propaganda and culture: study of the public utility poster from the 1970s to the present day), and it was the first (and last) “Poster Biennale” exhibition; in 1989 they would create, in Aosta, the Graphic design charter. My seminar Segno e scrittura (Sign and writing), which had been the introductory one, was the occasion for establishing some reflections made over the years. viii

In actual fact, this is one of the numerous variants in the set of images used as a support in a general introduction to visual communication. From one course to the next, from seminar to workshop, I often used to remix, substitute or add to them (first of all slides, and later, after the final advent of projectors for computer, pdf images). 1. Gioacchino da Fiore’s trinity circles. 2. Giordano Bruno’s mnemotechnical diagram. 3, 4. Two bas-reliefs of the royal palace at Abomey, in presentday Benin. 5. Representation of the cosmos (India, 18th century.). 6. The Marshall Islands in an ancient ocean navigation map. 7. Pre-darwinian diagram of evolutionary phenomena (Louis Agassiz, 1843). 8. The famous picture by Charles Joseph Minard representing Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

9. Diagram of routes on the Paris-Lyons railway section (19th century). 10, 11. Henry Beck’s map of the London Underground Railway of 1931 and preparatory sketch. 12. Synsemic index of On number and games by John Horton Conway (1971). 13. Quantitative diagram from Tools for Thought by Conrad Waddington (1977). 14. Life cycle in an illustration by Jan Lenica (1962). 15. Rome and London (Joel Katz, 1988). 16. Rome and Florence in my covers for two “Libri dell’Unità”. 17. The Lord’s Prayer in a 17th-century English version. 18. The presence of US regiments in Europe during the Great War: an example of the typewriter’s table vocation. 19, 20. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé in the 1897 layout and in the 1914 one. 21. Page from The Scarecrow by Schwitters, Steinitz and Van Doesburg, 1925. 22-25. Mayakovsky’s For the Voice by with layout by Lissitsky, 1923. 26. Visual poetry by the late futurist Carlo Belloli, 1961. 27. Page handwritten by Dostoyevsky for The Possessed. 28. Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Mouse’s Tail” in manuscript form and in a typographical translation. 29. Translation by Stefan Themerson of a poem by Li Bo, 1945. 30. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in the interpretation by Franciszka Themerson and in a current paperback. 31-34. Pages from Mon livre d’heures by Frans Maseerel, 1919. 35. Paul Klee, Einst dem Grau der Nacht, 1918. 36. Writing and drawing in Ben Shahn, 1963. 37. Raymond Queneau, Cent mille milliards de poèmes, 1960. 38. Eugène Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve in the layout by Massin (1964). 39. Buckminster Fuller in a layout by Quentin Fiore. 40. Herb Lubalin, 1965. 41, 42. “IBM” in two elaborations by Paul Rand, 1957 e 1981. 44-45. Saul Steinberg. [44] For this workshop (100 hours Lussu, 25 Ceppi, 25 Rizzo) in the Polytechnic’s Industrial Design degree course, which, like the previous year, was based on the production of A6 booklets (p. 52), I myself had prepared for my students – with great care, I must say – these four booklets in the same format, all twenty-four pages long. As well as accompanying the slideshows I did in the classroom with reproductions in miniature of each image and various comments, also visual, on each of them, the booklets also contained various other materials such as, for example, in the case of the first one, a beautiful poem by e.e.cummings: here is little Effie’s head / whose brains are made of gingerbread / when the judgement day comes / God will find six crumbs... [45] On the covers: Jan Tschichold’s penguin for Penguin Books; the rabbit god, patron saint of writing in the Mayan tradition, compiling an “accordion” book; two due “letter games” by Aaron Burns, Herbert Libalin’s righthand man in the ITC (International Typeface Corporation)

foundation, from his Typography (1961); a Q drawn freehand by Tschichold for Sabon. [46] A duodecimo of introduction to typography prepared in 2000 and then used for all the subsequent cycles (p. 146). [49] On the two following pages, the material given to students on the Industrial Design degree course at La Sapienza, Rome, in the academic year 2003-04. For my examination students were to create a number of fairly substantial A6 booklets, on the basis of the short story Enthymesis by Arno Schmidt, already done in A4 at Milan Polytechnic (p. 73). Some of these were published in issue no. 6 of “Progetto grafico” magazine (June 2006, pp. 12-14). [52] 04 Booklets This story of the A6 booklets (14.85 x 10.5 cm, mostly, but not always, laid out horizontally), was then taken up again several times; it began at Milan Polytechnic in the academic year 199596, when I was holding a workshop with Giovanni Anceschi (100 ore Lussu, 50 Anceschi, Manuela Rattin, tutor), and had as its guest Marcello Baraghini with his books “Millelire” for his Stampa Alternativa publishing house, which then became the inspiration for it. There were few sections at that time and therefore there were a lot of students – more than one hundred and fifty – in our workshop, divided into forty-five groups. To hand in the final work for the examination, each group was asked to make copies for all the others as well, plus five for the teaching staff. This made a total of more than two thousand booklets overall, which we found, before they were redistributed again, all heaped up in a worrying pile. For the booklets presented on these pages, and for all those in later sections, the basic instructions were as follows: A6 format (eight pages from one A4 sheet, for maximum efficiency; minimum of sixteen pages (eight in only a few cases), held together with metal staples, to activate a consistent sequence; a print-run of at least three copies, as the core of a limited run and to safeguard from do-it-yourself affectations (holes, fringes, embroidery, etc.); drawings only in black and white, without shades of grey, to reduce the matter to the bare essentials. And also, from time to time, language constraints; absence of alphanumeric symbols, or using only alphanumeric symbols or, again, no more than a certain number of alphanumeric symbols per page, or only figures, only straight-line segments, only triangles, etc. In fact, this choice of constraints always appeared to generate commendable solutions, while the absence of constraints certainly led to substantial compositions, but they were usually ix

much less interesting from the point of view of design procedures. On pages 64-67, compositions that were originally A4 (Percorsi) will also be found, being placed there for convenience of classification. Translations Here the students had to choose a poetry text in a foreign language and present it together with their translation in Italian. The problem, therefore, lay entirely in this correspondence. Since the experience was certainly repeated, the compositions presented on the following pages may have been produced in different years, but I am unfortunately not able to indicate which, with any certainty. One of the workshops was definitely held along with Daniele Turchi. [53] Action / Translation Time, a song by Pink Floyd from the album The dark side of the moon: “time, ticking away incessantly, the inevitable arrival of old age and death”.

The pamphlet design centres on the translation and on the actions it involves. Rendering graphically what translating means and what the procedures are that our minds use in this activity. For a beginner, translation starts with a search for the words: the meanings may be multiple and may deceive you; in addition, putting several words together may give meanings that are very different from those in the original text. I have therefore represented a long path which we go along towards a translation that is at the same time correct and nonliteral.

[...] The basic interpretative element that is emphasized graphically is unrequited love – the unreachability of the beloved person, the insecurity deriving from it, the anxiety, and altered perception. I tried to render these feelings with the design of a font for Greek that would suggest this alteration, through missing parts and segments reaching forward but unstable. In the font in Latin characters, used in the translations and in the transliterations, I adopted similar criteria, both as a vehicle for a poetic message and for the visual coherence of the page.

[55]

The layout, with the translations moving progressively away from the original text, aims to render the poetess’s heartrending emotion which, from the initial quiet, musical lines, arrives at the concluding ones, where there is now only desperation and an unbridgeable distance. Finally, in each line couplet, in order to reinforce the layout scheme, I negatively highlighted a fundamental word.

[56] A game comes out A popular Hebrew song about the months of the year. The Italian translation is turned round, so as to follow the progress from right to left of the Hebrew script. In the middle, between the original and the translation, the transliteration into the Latin alphabet, arranged so as to indicate the music. [57] I have a dream Martin Luther King’s speech of 28th August 1963. The English original is the one written by King himself.

[54]

[58]

Sappho

Ágota Kristóf

The fonts used were designed by the student.

A four-line poem from the beginning of the novel Yesterday. Minimal writing, short sentences, dry syntax and absence of adjectives [...] The frame appearing on each page is intended to represent the mental space that memories fight their way through, in a succession of linked images; it is a closed space, and past events, to which you are not allowed to return, can live only here. Memories rise to the light as if emerging from a well of Montalian memory; they are lightweight because they carry with them the lightness of remembered events, but at the same time they seem to struggle in the viscosity of the space because the weight of the present is still there to anchor them to reality.

The poetry text proposed here is a fragment by Sappho (2 Diehl); the two different translations of the first part are by Ugo Foscolo (1821) and Giovanni Pascoli (1895) and that of the final section is by Salvatore Quasimodo (1958). The task of the various translations was to give immediate graphic visualization (itself a form of a translation, albeit inter-semiotic) to the modifications that happen in transposing one language into another: poetry, therefore, is one and unique, but at the same time multiple. The difference between the various versions is also highlighted by the final metric scheme, which shows how much it widens (the marks with the dot at the centre show where the voice rests). x

Johnny Clegg

[64]

The song in which the South African musician (the “White Zulu”) tells of his marriage in Natal to Msinga, according to the traditional Zulu rite.

Routes 1 and 2

Dancing with the moonlight knight The Peter Gabriel song for Genesis, from the album Selling England by the pound (1973). The dark bars are the low tones, the light ones are the high tones, and the distance between the bars shows the speed (distanced-slow, close-fast). [59] Malagueña The text by Federico Garcia Lorca in the second movement of Symphony no. 14 by Dmitri Shostakovitch. [60] Game-books We had to create booklets with the procedures of old programmed instruction manuals, the direct antecedents of digital hypertexts, or of game-books as they used to be produced at one time. Cops and robbers [61] The two players toss a coin to play, with a simple mechanism of rewards and punishments (the robber obviously tries to escape with the money, while the guard has to stop him). Perfectly playable, as verified on several occasions in the classroom. [62] Domestic Kamasutra Four situations (apart from the car and the washing-machine, as shown here, there was also a bed and a chair), for each of which various possibilities are given, with satisfaction indices for men and women, a list of risks and their localization on the body (bruises, electric shocks, alarms, etc.) and crossreferences to other situations. The booklet was published in “Millelire” by Stampa Alternativa in 1999, with the title Lo famo strano? [63] Underground maze Each couple of facing pages offers different exits that crossreference to the same number of other pages. According to the choice made, you find yourself in blind alleys or you reach the prizes you are looking for.

Two-phase exercise. As I have found only the acetate projection copies that were prepared for discussing the results of the exercises with the students, and the names were on the back of the paper versions, I cannot give an indication of the authors.

Route 1 To represent (on an A4 sheet, photocopiable in black and white, with a one-centimetre, white margin) the route that the student takes on Wednesday mornings to reach the workshop from his or her own home, using exclusively lower-case letters of the alphabet, executed freehand and approximated to 12point Frutiger 55 body text. The orientation of the sheet will be vertical, and that of the letters horizontal. As only the letters of the alphabet can be used (excluding, therefore, punctuation marks, numbers and any other symbols), the only room for manoeuvre is the directly linguistic content of the communication and the arrangement of the letters on the sheet. The representation must be unmistakable: the sheet must be able to comprise an instruction manual for a purely ideal user, who does not know the topography of Milan or the geography of the region and who travels by public transport. The simplicity of the design will be appraised: efforts to reduce the number of letters necessary should not, however, be made at the expense of research. For example, the information could be tabulated, by arranging the different methods of locomotion on different lines, or one might consider space as a function of time between one phase of travel and the next, etc. The choice of the text should therefore be made according to the layout that one wants to pursue (it would not be very interesting, for the purposes of the exercise, to describe the route by transcribing a pure oral communication). Given a certain route and given the design constraints, the possible solutions are obviously limited; choices must be made and syntheses carried out, by exploring in particular the relationship between the letters and the whiteness of the support.

[66]

Route 2 To represent (on an A4 sheet, photocopiable in black and white, with a one-centimetre, white margin) the route that the student takes on Wednesday mornings to reach the workshop from his or her own home, using exclusively the signs for numbers 0 to 9 (approximating 12-point Frutiger 55 body text) and straight-line segments, arranged horizontally or vertically, and all executed freehand. Attempts at “visual poetry” are not considered relevant: the numbers or segments cannot be composed to form letters. xi

The aim of this exercise is to reflect the relationship with the previous one (that is to say, on the relationship between a visual communication that is more oriented to language and one that is less so), but it is not essential to refer to that: it is not, therefore, a matter of transcoding it (unless it shapes up well) and the configuration may be completely different. It is clear that, being unable to use or compose letters, it will be quite difficult to convey unambiguous information; in this case, too, the interlocutor is purely ideal, being nevertheless aware of the previous exercise. It is therefore a question of creation a supporting communication and it is up to the student to choose his or her own code.

[68] More routes A workshop held with Daniele Turchi, and with Nino Perrone and Liborio Biancolillo as collaborators. As on the previous pages, this was also a matter of representing the route from home to the Polytechnic. In this case, as is evident, no particular constraints were imposed. [72] 05 Narrations This section gives the results of operations of transcoding literary texts. A subset of this type of exercise, which included some pages of forty-one A6 booklets (and therefore, unlike part of what has been presented in the following pages, all resolved in sequential structures), was published in “Progetto grafico” no. 6, June 2005, pp. 8-25, with the title Piccoli libri dalla Biblioteca di Babele (“Little books from the Library of Babel”). Together with Antonio Perri we attempted an analysis of these operations, in particular for the booklet compositions: here are some extracts: “[...] There are a lot of very complex questions lined up in the field, which have been bitterly disputed by contemporary theoretical research. They are however enlightened by the very design nature of the artefacts examined; the latter therefore constitute, according to our reading hypothesis, a single, vast experimentation workshop on basic themes of visual communication. It is the design – as ought to occur more often – that is the preferred key to solving theoretical problems. [...] The notational strategies adopted in designing these booklets bring the reflection back onto the concrete field of what graphic art is and what its role is in understanding visual facts. In particular, this banishes the persistent common fallacy that graphic art is simply ‘cladding’, and that the designer has the sole task of providing an alternative expressive substance to the verbal one, as if it were a case of dressing texts that are already formed, with already-assigned structures and constrained to the one-dimensional temporality of the verbal xii

language. This notion of ‘interpretation through transcription’, almost through automatic substitution in fact, emphasizes the verbocentric domain (the “tyranny of the alphabet” discussed by Roy Harris), and ends up by denying, in the case of these booklets, the active role of graphic design in giving a complex visual form to a text whose only pertinent articulations are originally aural-verbal ones. There is no doubt, in fact, that each of these booklets, each in its own way, with results that are more or less significant but with each one structuring in any case its own notational syntax, reconfigures the text with considerable expressive coherence. [...] The students, in choosing the notational code, identified each time what level of content and/or expression of the source text to present again in the visual target text, thus reminding us that a phenomenology of translation must also take into account aspects of the substance formed that are not immediately relevant – aspects that may be defined as extralinguistic, but that are never extra-semiotic or extranotational. [...] The internal coherence of these visual texts authorizes us to ask an even more fundamental question: what is their degree of independent usability (meaning independently from the literary text that was the pretext for it), not just aesthetic but cognitive in the most general sense? And again, looking ahead to the prospects of communication, is the existence of visual texts that can ensure full usability, provided with all the complex baggage carried by the supports and by the traditional languages plausible? In other words, is it possible to envisage narrative texts that are independently and completely visual, which are able to convey all that is currently the prerogative, for example, of the novel form, with the emotional involvement, the indignatio, the knowledge of the circumstantial surroundings, the empathy towards the characters, the “plays on words” and, obviously, lots more? Left, the space of the appurtenances that accompanied the text, in which each composition can be approximately located. cold, descriptive register (translation) notation depiction warm, expressive register (interpretation) [73] Arno Schmidt It was the first year in which the Industrial Design degree course was activated, again in the Faculty of Architecture. Workshop with Mauro Bacchini (100 hours Lussu, 50 hours Bacchini); subject experts Manuela Rattin and Matteo Ricci. [73-76]

Individual exercise: A4 etc., as before; accuracy of execution (also in checking the good production of the final photocopy) is strongly recommended, as is a careful reading of this sheet. As in the case of the previous exercises (in particular Queneau, Borges and pasta with sardines),the opportunity offered here is the pretext for a general reflection on the various levels and

the different methods of visual communication, and not a problem drawn from current design situations. Arno Schmidt One chooses (it’s better, obviously, if one has read them all) one of the first three stories by Arno Schmidt contained in the collection Alessandro o della verità (Alexander or What is Truth, Einaudi, Turin 1965 and 1981), mentioned in the bibliography. Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) is one of the greatest German writers of the post-war period, and two other stories of his have recently been published in Italian (Il leviatano o il migliore dei mondi, [Leviathan or the best in the world] Linea d’ombra, Milan 1991), A leitmotif in Schmidt’s work, which contains a deep moral and civil commitment, is intolerance towards all presumptuous or obtuse forms of political power (Schmidt would perhaps have said that political power is always presumptuous and obtuse) and this, each time, in the stories of the collection (all set in ancient times, in a period from the 4th century B.C. to the 6th century A.D.) takes on the guise of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander, of the Carthaginian state at the time of the Punic Wars, of the Roman Republic that had by now come to dominate the Mediterranean, and of the Byzantine empire. Even in German-speaking countries Schmidt is considered difficult to read, because of the abundance of often indecipherable references and quotations and because of his “experimental” use of the written language. In actual fact, once you have overcome the initial impact, you realize that it is first of all a case of stories that are extraordinarily well-told, with characters that one can find endearing, as in all great literature, and that the apparently arbitrary form of the language is instead admirably functional to the narration of these stories and these characters. The typographical form Alexander or What is Truth is a typical case of typographical form inseparably linked to the definition of the text. One should note the details, the use of punctuation, of hyphens, of brackets and inverted commas, all with precise narrative functions, in particular in rendering dialogues and free thought associations. The first Einaudi edition of the book, on the other hand, represents perhaps the acme of the modern paperback book in Italy. Alexander or What is Truth is the first volume in the series “La ricerca letteraria” (Literary research), which, apart from being composed in Garamond Simoncini, which has already been mentioned previously, is practically the only Italian narrative to be composed in the unjustified way. The cover is attributed to Bruno Munari, and the internal form was worked out by the editorial staff of the publishing house. Analysis The three stories we are dealing with can be analyzed from multiple points of view: one of the many interpretation methodologies of modern literary criticism can be applied (and this should be done on the original text, maybe reflecting on the complexity of the problems of translation), or a more markedly semiological approach can be used (searching for metatextual variables and constants), or again, the texts can be subjected to a statistical-type survey (measuring the frequency of words or even of letters); the analysis could also be done

from a strictly linguistic viewpoint (by analyzing the lexis and the grammatical structures or the specific features of the written language compared to the spoken language), or from a purely typographical viewpoint, etc. For the purposes of this exercise we will deal with the stories as tales, in the most usual sense of the term, in which certain characters move in time and space, in which events occur that refer to different levels of reality. The following five classes of entities limit the scope of the exercise. Characters The three stories are all in the first person; Gadir and Enthymesis conclude with a paragraph written by others, respectively by Abdichiba, commander at the fortress of Chebar, and by Eratostheses, the great scientist of Cyrene who lived between 275 and 195 B.C. and who was director of the Library of Alexandria. In each of the stories, as well as the narrator, there are other characters and in each of the stories the role they play is different. In Gadir, at the level of the “real” world, there are the gaolers, and the tale gets crowded after the escape. In Enthymesis, the members of the expedition go on without ever meeting anybody, always staying together until the dramatic epilogue; other characters appearing form part of the level of memories, or of that of dreams or presumably of that of delirium and hallucination. In Alessandro the movement of human-beings is more complex: as well as the company of actors, there is the sequence of characters they meet, and Alexander and Aristotle are somehow ever-present. Time and space The three stories, apart from the division into paragraphs (shown by the pre-alignment of the first line), have an explicit time division into days. In the third story, Alexander or What is Truth, the days are further marked out by a blank line and by the name of the month (Targelion, the month of feasts in honour of Apollo that falls between May and June) in small capitals. In Enthymesis the days are associated with the distances covered in the desert, measured in “stades” (the Alexandrine “stade”, which was presumably the one used here, was equal to 184.85 m); also in Alexander, with a little patience and consulting a historical atlas, one could measure the march on Babylon, along the Euphrates. On the other hand, in Gadir, the movements are only imaginary: old Pitea, as we discover at the end, hardly ever moves out of his cell. Events and levels of reality Each of the stories, in particular the first two (Alexander is in fact more anecdotal, more constructed through direct observations), develops on different levels of reality, in each of which events happen (events may here be defined as everything that happens and therefore not just the fact that, for example in Enthymesis, Philostratus climbs up a gorge with Tarfan, but also that he declares that the Earth must be a disk). First of all, here is the “real world” and then the level of imagination, divided into various aspects. Both in Gadir and in Enthymesis there is a route that leads to the imagination (or delirium) to gain the upper hand, while in xiii

Alexander, the opposite occurs (it is the imaginary myth of Alexander that crumbles gradually, as the young diarist approaches the “truth”); in Enthymesis, we can also deduce from Eratosthenes’s final note that it is the level of the imagination that is the true one, while the Earth is, in fact, flat. There is also a specific dream-level, which is particularly important in Enthymesis; and then there are also the memories and the “hearsay”, and the considerations and reflections. Structure The structure of the stories here means the set of relationships among the five classes of entities taken into consideration (characters, time, space, events and levels of reality), including the relationships within each of the five classes; relationships, therefore, between different classes of entities (for example, between spaces and levels of reality) or between entities of the same class (for example between characters themselves). The exercises will consist in visualizing the structure or, more plausibly, part of the structure, of the chosen story. Examples It is easy, for example, to construct a spatial-temporal graph for Enthymesis (distances on the x-axis and times on the y-axis) that would allow the position of the expedition to be localized (and therefore render the progress of the speed) in each of the days of the story. Each character could be represented by a letter (or by a number or any other symbol). The events could then be inserted, maybe ordered in their turn into sub-classes, and the symbols for the events could have each time an attribute that would indicate the level of reality into which it falls (a triangle, for example, for the “real” world and a circle for dreams). The story could thus be almost “played” on a chessboard, in which each square represents both a day and a distance, and on which the pieces representing the characters, events and the levels of reality move (in the case of this exercise, the pieces would, obviously, not be able to move and it would be necessary to represent the various situations simultaneously) . Or one could analyze in particular the structure of the dreams, or highlight the relationship between events of the present and events of the past. Or one could apply the already-quoted method used by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale [p. 115], and so on. The exercise has analogies both with the initial one (Queneau) and with that of the pasta with sardines for icons: on the one hand, it is a matter of highlighting relationships, as in Queneau, and on the other, of translating an alphabetic text into different visual codes, as in the pasta with sardines (although in the latter a structure of relationships is actually always present). Constraints The composition, which will be the main basis for the examination assessment, must be as ordered as possible and simplicity and economy of symbols will be appreciated. Attempts at depiction, especially of an anthropomorphous type, are not recommended. Any symbols must be constructed only by using elementary geometrical shapes (rectangles and squares, circles and semicircles, and equilateral triangles), and avoiding, in the construction of each symbol, complex aggregations of these xiv

shapes. Continuous or broken lines, as far as possible of a constant thickness, may be used. Freehand symbols may not be used, except for alphabetic texts, which must be approximated to the usual Helvetica light 10point body text (if created on a computer, they must actually be in Helvetica light 10-point body text), including any titles. Only lower-case letters of the English alphabet, numbers from 0 to 9 and punctuation marks (comma, semi-colon, colon, full stop, and round and square opening and closing brackets) may be used; the total number of alphabetical symbols, numbers and punctuation marks (including both those used for texts and those that may be used in some coded function) may not be more than 500. Care must be taken to ensure that the final photocopy is centred (there must be a margin of 10 mm on each side of the sheet). The deadline for handing in compositions is no later than the end of the day of 26th May 1994.

Two pages from Alessandro o della verità by Arno Schmidt (1965), first volume in the series “La ricerca letteraria” published by Einaudi until 1973. After this, which presented “outdents” instead of indents as in the original German edition, all the twenty-one following volumes were set unjustified and with the same page margins. Undoubtly the best Italian pocket series from the time of Aldo Manuzio (10.5 x 18 cm, paperback sewed with cotton stitches). [77] On the left-hand page, three compositions already published in my La lettera uccide, pp. 42-45. These are the only ones in this group, alas, for which I am able to give the authors. [80-81] The horror! Visual Communication workshop held along with Mauro Bacchini (100 hours Lussu, 50 hours Bacchini), Manuela Rattin and Matteo Ricci assistants. I have unfortunately found no compositions for the exercise on Stevenson referred to in the instructions (this was the fable The song of the morrow, see p. 104).

These last two individual exercises, together with exercise 09, are those that will be assessed for the purposes of the examination grade. The exercises carried out previously, both individual and group exercises, will be used as additional orientation material and may possibly directly affect the final grade, but only to improve it. The first assessment criterion, as mentioned several times in class, is the compliance by the students with the imposed constraints; the compositions in which it seems that the authors have not properly read the instructions supplied will be judged in consequence. An understanding of the constraints (the problem-solving

aspect) is central to defining the design activity, and sets it apart from generic artistic activity; it is no use having ideas, even brilliant ones, if these do not respond to the problems posed. A badly produced photocopy, for example, implies that the most elementary conditions of reproduction requested have not been understood. Reasonable accuracy in execution is also required, and this obviously – given the extreme technical simplicity of the compositions - cannot be considered as particularly difficult; producing a careful working drawing is here only a question of patience, which can be resolved in a very limited time of application. The insistence on having the final drawing in freehand, although on a base that may be created on the computer or with ruler and set-square, is based on the conviction that a minimum standard of manual control is essential for the correct expression of intentions; it is not therefore a matter of “beautiful drawing” or “beautiful handwriting”, so much as of an ordered mind and a communicative ability. As we saw several times in class, inaccuracy in execution rapidly leads to bad communication: irregular line spacing and spacing between words, and lack of uniformity in strokes inevitably cause a decline in perceptual clarity and lead one to misinterpret the meaning that the organization of the forms was intended to have. The third element of assessment is obviously the originality of the composition. Given the markedly experimental nature of this preparatory workshop, nobody knows in advance what to expect and it is the students’ work that will possibly attribute meanings to the exercises and give them a sense. All the exercises are intentionally limited to very well-defined environments; in these last two, as in all the previous ones, no knowledge is required of the students, except what is explicitly supplied or could be assumed from a careful analysis of the object of the exercise. In the case of Stevenson’s story and Conrad’s novel all that is needed is to reflect on the texts themselves; if students want to get hold of further documentation and search for ideas and information, they are welcome to do so, but it is not essential. The students, therefore, will find themselves faced with written texts – a primary form of visual communication, since they are individuals, ultimately coming to grips with their own selves. The fact that no constraints were placed on exercise 10 (a tale by Stevenson) concerning the symbols to be used should not give rise to a corresponding explosion of “creativity”. It is an opportunity offered especially to those students who believe they can propose something interesting as an alternative to having narrow constraints imposed, but simplicity and clarity will obviously be appreciated (due care and attention must be given to a good photocopy reproduction of the black and white line drawing). It goes without saying that we expect the exercise in any case to be a reflection on what has been said and done in the workshop (one can certainly say, for example, that pure illustrative solutions shall not be considered as relevant). If, on the other hand, anybody should feel the need for stricter constraints, they can give themselves these, or they can apply

those of exercise 11. The aim is to be able to arrive at the concluding day of the workshop (31st May) with a discussion of the last exercises and the announcements of the assessments. It is therefore essential that the last exercise (11) should be handed in no later than 17th May, so that there is time for these assessments to be carried out smoothly. The heart of darkness Individual exercise 11. For those who have never done so, read Heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad and create a visual representation of it according to the now well-known constraints (A4, black and white, margins, freehand, etc.). Only the 26 lower-case letters of the alphabet may be used, approximated to 12-point Frutiger 55 and 75 body text, arranged as desired. The sheet does not need to have a defined orientation. Keys to symbols should be avoided, and the fact that there is no need for them will be appreciated; any explanations considered essential for understanding the compositions may be written on the back of the sheet or communicated orally at the time of handing in. The latest deadline for handing in compositions is 17th May. The novel tells of a journey up the Congo river and down into the depths of the soul (as always in great works, there are multiple interpretations); the exercise sheet is the space of the novel, and therefore of the journey. The narrative is split into two levels: the group of friends on board the Nellie, one evening in the Thames estuary, listen to Marlow talking about a journey (from the strictly typographical point of view, one will note the superabundance of paragraphs in inverted commas, different for each edition, or preceded by hyphens indicating a parenthesis). There are currently numerous versions of the novel on sale: Einaudi (16,000 Lire), Feltrinelli (7,000 Lire), Garzanti (8,500 Lire), Oscar Mondadori (9,000 Lire), Rizzoli (9,000 Lire). School editions (with notes, with parallel text in English, or only English text with notes): Bruno Mondadori (16,000 Lire); Bruno Mondadori in English (15,800 Lire); Mursia, with parallel text (12,000 Lire); Cideb, in English (11,000 Lire); Cideb, with cassette (13,000 Lire). The common Italian translation of the title renders imperfectly the English original: “cuore di tenebra”, in fact, seems almost to be just an attribute of Kurtz’s; and the more worrying, general meaning of it is lost. Only the Oscar Mondadori edition translates “cuore di tenebre”; one could argue, in favour of the general sense, for “il cuore delle tenebre” (“the heart of the darkness”), or even, “il cuore dell’oscurità” (“the heart of obscurity”). Kurtz’s last words, too (“The horror! The horror!”) seem distressingly more banal in the translations (“Che orrore! Che orrore!”, “L’orrore! L’orrore!”, “Quale orrore! Quale orrore!”). The famous cinematographic transposition is Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse now (Orson Welles had one planned, but unfortunately never made it). The death of Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in the film is explicitly xv

inspired (one can actually see a copy in a frame) by The golden bough by James George Frazer (1890), a famous work of research into comparative ethnology which takes its cue from the ritual murder of the priest in the sacred grove of Lake Nemi. Very little remains of the very human Marlow of the book (who is also the narrator in other novels by Conrad) in the neurotic Willard of the film (Martin Sheen, excellent anyway). On the opening pages, Conrad describes the narrator: “Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol”. In the closing lines we have: “Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha”. The Swedish writer Olof Lagercrantz, in a fine book about the book (In viaggio con “Cuore di Tenebra”, Marietti, Genoa 1988), explains that the attitude with palms outwards is one of the Buddha positions known as “Viruda”, and expresses compassion. Compassion for the suffering of all sentient beings.

[86] Another interpretation, with different constraints and in A6 booklets, of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This was the final exercise, valid as an examination test for the visual communication workshop held jointly with Angelo Monne and with Attilio Baghino, tutor, on the Industrial Design Course of the Architecture Faculty, based in Alghero. During the semester the students had practised with a whole set of less difficult exercises of this type, including the Caponata recipe (p. 174-75). Alongside, the workshop syllabus.

In the Form workshop the students will produce, on a weekly or fortnightly basis, a series of booklets in size 14.5 x 10 cm. The booklets will contain the representation of different messages, of variable complexity, obtained by using different visual languages each time, according to specific constraints. The concluding booklet, valid as an examination test, will have characteristics of summarizing the work carried out in the workshop. Every work of communication design is, anyway – even if sometimes it is not only this – “giving form” to a communication problem; it is in fact mostly a question of organizing the message manifested by the issuer in various ways, onto a two-dimensional support. Therefore each design operation is an operation of semiotic transcoding, meaning the “translation” of a message expressed with the use of certain codes into a message expressed with others; it is the moving from one system of symbols to another, so as to maintain nevertheless, as far as possible, similar meanings. Since maximum eclecticism in usable visual languages prevails today, compared with previous ages, this set of exercises aims to familiarize students with the management of different methods of visual structuring of the space. We call the organization of a message in a two-dimensional xvi

space, so that its meaning can be detected specifically from this organization (unlike the single- dimensional linearity of the verbal language), “synsemia”. Various possibilities of synsemic relationships will be experimented in the workshop, and these will also, in the sequence of the pages, take on inescapably dynamic forms. The presence of constraints that are different each time, starting from that of allowing only black and white, is essential. The use of only black and white drains the structure of the message and confines it to its essential elements. Imposing different constraints as regards the visual languages to be used, on the other hand, enables the desired awareness of it to be obtained.

[90] Remember, my beloved The workshop “Notazioni e narrazioni” (Notations and narrations), which took place with the collaboration of Lara Seregni and Luciano Perondi, was based on a tale by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Automata (Die Automate, 1814). Hoffmann’s text, very representative of Romanticism in the early seventeenth century, tells of an intrusion of the irrational into everyday life.. Ferdinand, the main character, following a conversation with an automaton (the “talking Turk”) finds himself faced with the dark dimensions of existence: who was the mysterious singer, his meeting with whom changed his life? What is the role of the enigmatic Professor X? Was he present at the wedding in the village of P., or not? Since Hoffmann deliberately gives no answer to these questions (and the charm of the novella derives from this, that it leaves the reader in suspense after having involved him), students therefore had, first of all, to work out their own interpretation, which would allow them to set out a strategy to deal with the problem posed. Some lines of Pietro Metastasio, written for an aria in Alexander in India (1729) and on which Franz Schubert composed a famous Lied (D 688/4), are quoted in Italian in the original German text: Remember, my beloved, if it happens that I die, how much this faithful spirit loved thee. And if cold ashes still can love, even in the urn I shall adore thee.

The workshop aims to study in depth the theme of the relationship between verbal narration and visual narration. How far can a notation that does not directly transcribe the verbal language represent narrative complexity? And what are the meanings that this notation can convey compared with conventional narration?

1 Work may be carried out in groups of no more than three students. 2 The proposed text (Automata by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, 1814) will be represented, through any desired visual languages but only in black and white line drawing (without grey shades), on a A6 finished size (14.8 x 10.5 cm; flat size 29.7 c 10.5 cm.) leaflet of at least 16 pages including cover, in 80-90 gr/sq.m. white paper, fastened with two metal staples on the back. 3 One or two pages, positioned wherever might be considered suitable, shall be devoted to a synoptic representation of the whole text. 4 One or two pages, positioned wherever might be considered suitable, shall be devoted to some indications of the reasons behind the design and, if considered necessary, to the key. 5 The names of the authors will be shown clearly on the cover. 6 No more than 11 letters of the alphabet may appear on each page, with the sole exception of the cover pages (first and fourth) and of the one (or ones) devoted to reasons behind the design and the key. 7 3 copies of the leaflet shall be handed in.

The black is the material quality, while the white is the woman-spirit who invades and portrays, who unites and divides, modifying everything it comes into contact with.

[93]

The story was interpreted by representing it in a scheme containing its cardinal points. Through a dual reading of the scheme, it is possible to identify the moments of the story that come into contact with each other, generating an effect of optical illusion that makes a simultaneous visual reading impossible. The automaton causes time to telescope, so that present, past and future lose their meaning.

The different narrative intensity of the story is represented by the progress of the line. The narration is also seen as a series of processes set in motion by the characters, viewed as mechanisms. A further aspect is the strong duality between the mechanical world and natural beings, a theme that reflects the times of Hoffmann, in which industrial development is contrasted with the Romantic tension that aims to rediscover man’s spiritual qualities.

The presence of music in the story, through three levels. The first, at the top, is the one describing the “musical” scenes in which the characters are involved. The second one, in the centre, highlights the musical terms. The third one, the “phantom” at the bottom, represents what, in our opinion, is the “resonance” of the narration.

[91] [94] An attempt was made to represent the story, or rather one aspect of it, through different languages, all having in common the use of the same technique: ink on paper. The focal point is the character of Ferdinand who is influenced by meetings with other characters during the tale. The whole representation is based on a metaphor: man, like a tree, grows and suffers the influence of external factors, and so Ferdinand’s branches, through meetings and other events, become stronger or weaker. The branches of rationality are made up of straight lines, created with a roller, and those of irrationality are curvy and irregular, having been obtained by blowing onto drops of ink. Thorns and flowers indicate if the situation is negative or positive.

[92]

The forms – the male protagonists – come into being with geometrical precision, as solid and secure as the characters are at the beginning; then they evolve and become organic and fluid.

Semasiographic writing Workshop of A6 booklets, conducted with Vanessa Capozza and Luciano Perondi. From the Story of your life (1998) by Ted Chiang, which I then translated in 2008 in the Stampa Alternativa series “Scritture” (Writings), along with others in the collection Storie della tua vita (Stories of your life and others, 2002). The story tells of the arrival of aliens – heptapods – and of how the linguist Louise Banks decodes their language. But language and writing (obviously not linear) are such that immersing oneself in them means falling into simultaneity and therefore cancelling and overturning the flow of time. From Chiang’s story: “When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the world-views that ultimately came across were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an xvii

order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. [...] I finished the last radical in the sentence, put down the chalk, and sat down in my desk chair. I leaned back and surveyed the giant Heptapod B sentence I’d written that covered the entire blackboard in my office. It included several complex clauses, and I had managed to integrate all of them rather nicely. Looking at a sentence like this one, I understood why the heptapods had evolved a semasiographic writing system like Heptapod B; it was better suited for a species with a simultaneous mode of consciousness. For them, speech was a bottleneck because it required that one word follow another sequentially. With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. [...] For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place”.

[98]

The Heptapod B grammar handbook is offered as an essential tool for any human being who might come across this fascinating alien language. A systematic explanation of its syntax (revealed by the famous linguist Louise Banks and her working group during the heptapods’ stay on Earth) appears alongside numerous practical examples that make the brochure easy to consult and immediately understandable. Through representation mechanisms and linear procedures (for example, algebraic formulae and double-entry tables), the handbook introduces the heptapod logic, based on simultaneity.

The part of the story taken for examination is the one during which Louise Banks and Gary Donnelly try to communicate with the heptapods. The system of symbols travels along the timeline, pinpointing the main actions intercepted inside the circles. Under each circle, a sort of caption explains the symbols.

[96]

The reasons behind the design which led to this representation of the story through summary diagrams are to be found in its complex de-structuring process. By making clear the values belonging to narrative composition (rhythm, relationships between characters, key events and time projection) five keys for interpretation were obtained. The representation was therefore divided into two non-linear levels: spoken, Heptapod A, and written, Heptapod B. Heptapod A, described from a background composed according to the alien entaxis, generates symbolic vibrations through algorithmic processes. Heptapod B, obtained analytically from a numerical pattern, is made up of semograms which in the process of genesis are linked to the time displacement of the story (axis of symmetry). The parallelism between linear human language and non-linear alien language is highlighted by the use of straight lines (past) and curves of a circle (future) of variable thickness according to the parameters that emerged from the de-structuring phase.

The verbal language makes it often tricky, not to say impossible, to read the wide spectrum of information hidden among the characters in the text. With the help of a simple application designed for the purpose, I opted for a structural analysis that could provide me with transverse and immediate information, able to show in just one glance some significant aspects of the different semantic areas under examination. The graphs obtained are the result of a combination of algorithmic studies on the text (strings, sequences, structural elements, etc.), examined so as to transform quantitative information into qualitative parameters to evaluate the text from a new point of view. This type of representation, by sacrificing the immediate comprehension of texts, nevertheless leaves aside the forced “horizontal” reading of it to embrace a “vertical” view, in which value is given to the individual component parts.

[99] This is, in fact, a composition from a previous exercise based on the same story, which was done in the academic year 200102, again at Milan Polytechnic. At that time, obviously, the horizontal size constraint was not imposed. Other workshop results are shown on pages 18 and 19 of the above-mentioned issue no. 6 of “Progetto grafico”, June 2005. [100] Electric ants Workshop entitled Representation and narration, based on the story The electric ant by Philip K. Dick, 1969, published in Italian, according to the Vegetti catalogue (www.fantascienza. com/catalogo), in eleven different editions. A wealthy interplanetary entrepreneur, Garson Poole, is made to realize by chance that he is nothing more than an android, an “electric ant”, as these artificial creatures are disparagingly called by humans. In the final scene Poole finds a button that opens a small door in his chest; inside, there is a device that runs a programmed tape, the programmed tape. Poole sticks two fingers into the door and gradually as he pulls the tape out, reality begins to disappear.

To study in depth the relationship between verbal narration and visual narration: how far can a notation that does not directly transcribe the verbal language represent narrative xviii

complexity? What are the meanings that a “visual translation” can convey compared with conventional narration, and how far can this representation be used autonomously ? 1 The text to be represented: The electric ant by Philip K. Dick, 1968, published in 1969. Dick writes in a subsequent comment of 1976: “Again the theme: how much of what we call ‘reality’ is really out there and how much is in our heads? The end of this story has always frightened me... the image of the wind blowing, the sound of a vacuum. As if the character could hear the final destiny of the world itself”. 2 The text will be represented through visual languages and techniques for creating it as desired, on a A6 size leaflet (open 29.7 x 10.5 cm) of at least 16 pages including cover, in white 80-90 gr/sq. m. paper, held together with two metal staples on the back. 3 One or two pages, positioned wherever might be considered suitable, may be devoted to an overall representation of the whole text. 4 One or two pages, positioned wherever might be considered suitable, shall be devoted to some indications of the reasons behind the design and if considered necessary, to the key (overall representation and/or reasons behind the design and/ or key may possibly coincide). 5 No more than 11 letters of the alphabet may appear on each page, with the sole exception of the cover pages (first and fourth) and of the one (or ones) devoted to reasons behind the design and the key. 6 It is to be hoped that the composition will fall into the central area of the scheme reproduced on page 8 of issue no. 6 of “Progetto grafico”. 7 The names of the authors will be shown clearly on the cover. 8 Work may be carried out in groups of no more than two students. 9 The leaflet shall be created in a set of 3 true copies in black and white.

of the present moment, enlightenment by the Absolute, external interferences); 2) representation of situations in the story that would give information for the diagram.

[104] The song of the morrow The song of the morrow This is the last of the twenty stories in the collection Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson, published posthumously in 1896, two years after his death. It is a circular story: the daughter of the King of Duntrine, who has no care for the morrow and has no power upon the hour, lives in a castle on the seashore; one day while walking along the beach, where strange things happened in ancient times, she meets an old crone, who in the end, after having thought the thought, she discovers to be herself. The whole thing is accompanied by the “song of the morrow”, played on the flute by a mysterious character. The title of the workshop, conducted together with Luciano Perondi, was Sinsemie combinatorie. The students were given no other constraints apart from Stevenson’s story. The circularity of the story, however, lent itself particularly to emphasizing some combinatory character, which the students were encouraged to research. Below is the sonnet I composed for the students, to have fun with them and make the workshop successful; for some strange reason it was left out of my final report by the school authorities. Sonnet of today and tomorrow There were twenty-five of them in the convent, And they made songs of the morrow There were those who were sad and those who were glad There were funny things and strange objects Each person there was intent on his work And if at times their efforts were in vain They just had to listen to the cold wind, To open their ears to the singing of the morrow. There were lots and lots, almost a hundred, And the force ran through their hands, I say it loud here, I do not repent of it, And they heard the sounds from far off, The notes that the wind brings in the evening As it sings the song of the morrow. A little children’s theatre carved out in cardboard, where surroundings and characters clearly come onto the scene as desired. [105]

[101]

My interpretation is based on a double analysis of the story: 1) the protagonist’s state of consciousness, through a diagram indicating the degree of affirmation of the four load-bearing emotional factors (attachment to the material world, awareness

In this installation, a set of nine panels lined with different materials, each one for each of the basic elements in the story, form an environment. The user is invited to put the panels in relation to each other, using suitable hooks, with coloured tapes that create the threads of the stories. xix

[106] Eight rectangular tiles, each divisible into four according to the axes of symmetry, produce 32 equal modular elements leading to a total of 1,048,576 (32E) possible narrative paths. [107] A real musical instrument: eight copper pipes of different lengths (established with the consultancy of a master lutemaker), hanging on eight metal supports fixed to blocks of cement, form a tonal scale. Each pipe is associated to an event, and the three authors performed the Song of the morrow to a musical score for three voices, one for each character in the story. By modifying the score, numerous variants in the narration can be obtained; but since one can obviously give a more general interpretation of the event, it is possible to play numerous other stories as well (the students produced, with the same instrumentation, a score for Red Riding Hood, too). [108] A cloth book bound in velcro: the twelve pages can therefore be re-composed, changing their sequence. Since the format of the pages is a double square, and therefore two pages with their long sides placed alongside each other again form a square, this results in the six sides of a cube, which can be assembled using the velcro elements. In this way the parts of the action that take place inside the cube (the castle in the story), and those that take place outside can immediately be highlighted. Photographs printed on the fabric are integrated with sewn and embroidered elements in an object that has a considerable synaesthetic, visual, tactile and sound effect. [110] The talisman Pasta with sardines 1 and 2 One of the first exercises, in two phases, in the first workshop I held with Mauro Bacchini (100 ore Lussu, 50 Bacchini, Manuela Rattin and Matteo Ricci, subject experts) in the first year that the Architecture Faculty’s Degree Course in Industrial Design was activated. In that year the workshop examination test was the one on the story by Arno Schmidt (p. 73). I did not, in fact, find the recipe on the left, which was supplied to students in a sequential form without distinction, in the Talismano della felicità by Ada Boni (where, in the 1949 edition I consulted – the nineteenth – pasta with sardines is nevertheless very charmingly presented), although I do not remember where I took it from. I am unfortunately unable to go back to the authors of the compositions, except for certain of those in phase 2 which have already been published in my La lettera uccide.

large glasses of oil, 5 filleted anchovies, pepper as desired, 100 g pine nuts, 100 g sultanas, 800 g short macaroni. Clean the fennel, removing hard leaves, wash and put it in a pan with around 2 litres of cold salted water. Bring it up to the boil and simmer for about ten minutes, then drain well and chop. Keep to one side the fennel cooking water. Clean the sardines, open them, leaving the two halves joined, and remove head and bones. Wash them in plenty of salted water and dry on a towel. Over a low heat, gently fry an onion in a pan with a glass of oil; when it starts to change colour, add half the sardines and crush them with a wooden spoon so as to reduce them to a pulp. Then add the anchovies, washed, drained and softened in a frying pan, and seasoned with salt and pepper. Add the pine nuts, sultanas (soaked in water) and the fennel. Cover and allow the flavours to develop for a few minutes. Over a low heat cook the other half of the whole sardines in a pan with a little oil. Turn them over without breaking them, using a wooden spoon, and season them with a pinch of salt. Remove from the heat after around 10 minutes. Bring the fennel water to the boil, pour in the macaroni, mix and allow to cook “al dente”, then drain. Season the pasta with about half of the prepared sauce. Put a layer of pasta in the bottom of a dish, arrange a few whole sardines on top of this and a few spoonfuls of sauce, and continue until all the ingredients are used up. Finish with the macaroni covered in sauce. Cover the baking dish and place in a pre-heated oven (160°) to cook for 20 minutes. You can serve the pasta either hot or cold.

Pasta with sardines 1 Lay out the recipe shown on this sheet (group exercise: one composition for each group is sufficient). A4, black on white and photocopy, as previous exercises. Writing in freehand, on lines all with the same orientation, approximating to Helvetica 10-point body text character. Using only letters of the English alphabet and if necessary punctuation marks (comma, colon, semi-colon, full stop), numbers and round brackets. Use only lower-case (if use is made of punctuation, start with lower-case even after a full-stop, etc.). Reformulate the text if necessary (obviously removing things, but also adding or repeating or, for example, avoiding the imperative form).

[111]

The object of the exercise is the visual organization of the complexity of instructions with the minimum use of symbols. This does not automatically mean a smaller number of symbols, because a certain redundancy may prove to be useful for visualizing the complexity; it is therefore a matter of looking for a point of balance between complexity and economy of means. It is clear that, given the constraints, one can manoeuvre only with the relationships between portions of text (any “underlinings”, which could be resolved by using different fonts or different colours, may therefore be signalled only with a particular arrangement); the room for manoeuvre, since the text to be followed occupies around a quarter, corresponds to around three-quarters of the sheet.

Pasta with sardines: Ingredients (for 6 people): 300 g. wild fennel, salt as desired, 500 g. fresh sardines, 2 sliced onions, 2

Regardless of current usage (one should not therefore refer to a definite interlocutor, but to a generic interlocutor, who only

xx

has a knowledge of the terms and who can, in some way or another, be enabled to cook the dish), the recipe may be arranged according to different possible organizational criteria: 1/ temporal, from the list of ingredients to the conclusion (as seen in the given text, drawn up according to the current usage); 2/ by places (stove, preparation area, etc.); 3/ by ingredients; 4/ by tools (pans, frying pans, spoons, etc.); 5/ by operations (washing, chopping, seasoning, etc.). One could then try to intersect several systems, hypothesizing, for example, that one has to give priority to places and tools. A guide for this choice may come from the answer to the following question: What priorities enable, in the context of the given constraints, the complexities of the information to be more clearly arranged on the sheet?

[114-115]

Pasta with sardines 2 A4, black on white (care in execution is required) and photocopy, group exercise. This is a question of giving a completely different representation from the already-analyzed recipe for pasta with sardines, which must be visualized without using an alphabetical code (or a customary representation of numbers). A suitable system of symbols supplied with a suitable grammar (understood as a set of rules for aggregating the symbols) must therefore be designed to enable the visual communication of the recipe, through a suitable key. The proposed problem is an abstract problem and one should not be concerned that the solution must be feasible in an everyday context. The object of the exercise is not, by any means, the immediate comprehensibility by the person who wants to prepare pasta with sardines. The object of the exercise is the representation of complexity with a reduced number of symbols (one should reread the instructions for the previous exercise), possibly with a logical and formal coherence, and pasta with sardines is simply an opportunity to do this. 1. Construction of symbols The symbols must be taken from a square q with side ab (where a is a number from 4 to 8, and b a measurement in mm.), subdivided in turn into aC=n small squares. a and b must be chosen by taking account of the following points 3 and 4. The n small squares may be white or black and the lines of the grid must not be visible. The number of possibilities of blackening the small squares within the grid, from all white ones to all black ones, and going through all the intermediate combinations, is 2n (if grey were also provided for, this would be 3n, and if there were 4 colours, it would be 4n etc.). For a=4, n=16 and the possibilities are therefore 2BG=65,536; for a=8 the possibilities are 2GE – quite a large number.

It is however preferable that the square q is always perceptually recognizable: those combinations that make recognition possible (leaving, for example, a reduced number of white small squares in a black field, or blackening only the small squares along the edge, or marking the points of q, etc.) are therefore to be preferred. 2. The system On the basis of the given constraints (and of the further ones shown in points 3 and 4) the design criteria for the symbols (defined in point 1 as combinations of n small white or black squares within a square q) must be chosen. One can choose whether to try the route of depiction (meaning that one can see that it concerns, for example, a saucepan) or, at the other extreme, that of a totally conventional code (purely geometrical configurations of small squares), or one can choose an intermediate route. One may, for example, design a symbol for each of the recipe’s constituent elements: a symbol for each of the ingredients (it should be noted that, without going into questions of chemical composition, water, too, can be considered an ingredient), one for each of the tools (it should be noted that water, too, can be considered a tool, when it is used for washing), and one for each of the operations, etc. The symbols may be divided by classes and therefore, for example, the symbols relating to the ingredients may all be grouped by certain obvious characteristics compared with all the others. Or one might study a dynamic system, in which the symbols can change into other ones: for example, the addition of an element (as if it were a suffix or a prefix) might indicate that a certain ingredient has already been partially prepared. From a pure morphological point of view the problem of designing a set of symbols, within the given constraints, is not dissimilar from that of designing an alphabet: in each of them it is a case of establishing formally coherent systems that have a visual homogeneity. In the case of the alphabet, the thicknesses must be proportionally homogeneous, and the serifs, if present, must be in a similar form, etc. Likewise in this case of this exercise, all the symbols must be made to appear as if forming part of the same group. 3. Grammar and staging The symbols must be laid out in a rectangular grid (with the sides parallel to those of the A4 sheet), composed of square modules equal to q, and making sure that each module contains just one symbol or is left blank (one should therefore avoid partial superimpositions). One may choose whether to leave visible also the parts not occupied by symbols. One should leave a 10 mm. margin on all sides of the sheet: the maximum dimensions of r, without taking into account the provisions in point 4, will therefore be 190 and 277 mm. The maximum number of modules that may compose r, without taking into account the provisions in point 4, will obviously depend on a and b (if a=7 and b=3, for example, this number may not be greater than 117, and if a=4 and b=2.5 it cannot be greater than 513). In order to proceed to the layout, it will be necessary to establish a grammar, in view of the object of giving meaning and if possible, visual coherence to the whole. One might, for example, establish that the symbols for the ingredients are always on the left of those for the operations, xxi

or that the tools are always below; but one might also decide that a certain ingredient and a certain related operation are identified by one single symbol. One may also prearrange (see point 2) a dynamic mechanism of symbols, which change into others through a certain number of stages. One could establish on one of the axes a temporal progression (even a mediocre knowledge of cooking techniques enables one to hypothesize implementation times also for those stages that are not specified in the original recipe) and on the other axis, the intervention of ingredients and operations, or one could try to visualize the recipe in stages, presenting the state of all the elements for each stage. 4. Key The same side of the sheet (always complying with the minimum margin of 10 mm. from the edges) must show the key for understanding the system, so as to make decoding possible. The space available will be a rectangle that will also have maximum dimensions of 190 and 277 mm. The symbols, if shown, must be the same size as those laid out in the grid and the alphabetic writing must be approximated to Helvetica 10 pt, as given for the previous exercise. A balance must therefore be found between number of symbols and available space: too high a number of symbols will, in fact, not leave enough room for the relative decoding. 5. Other considerations It would not be reasonable to prearrange the symbols without having an idea of the structure of relationships that one wants to follow (one might find oneself, as noted above, with too high a number of symbols and with little room for manoeuvre); in the same way, it is not reasonable to think of the structure without having an idea of how to generate the symbols. The need for numbering, and thus for using linking arrows, etc, must be resolved while keeping the constraints in mind, and therefore by designing possible appropriate symbols. A not-very-interesting solution to the problem could be, for example, the mechanical substitution, in the basic text, of all the words with the same number of conventional symbols arranged in the same order (and the even-less-interesting solution of arranging symbols alternative to the letters of the alphabet would anyway not comply with the constraint laid down at the beginning). To carry out the exercise, no specific knowledge is required; an understanding of the constraints and the exercise of reasoning powers are sufficient. On the other hand, the exercise may be an opportunity to get to the heart of a whole set of current aspects of visual communication. From the design point of view, regardless of the specific content (pasta with sardines), the problem is not far from that of designing a system of symbols for a control panel, or of a system of icons for an interactive multimedia publishing product. From a meta-design point of view (meaning studying design methodologies and structures independently of specific applications) the problems implies a reflection on the visualization of transformations and aggregations. In particular, the fact that it is a matter of predesigning a script (a finished set of decodable visual significants, equipped with rules for aggregation) should be considered. Compared with the previous exercise, the fundamental xxii

difference between the two recipe representations (both verbalizable, but both supplied with visual elements that are not strictly linguistic) lies in the fact that in the first, it is essential to know Italian while in the second, Italian should be essential only for understanding the key. Cardona’s book Antropologia della scrittura (Anthropology of writing) can supply a lot of stimuli and, in any case, a fascinating general picture of writing in all its cultural variants. Vladimir Propp’s book Morphology of the Folktale, on the other hand, gives an example, albeit of a different type, of the application of formalism (symbols plus grammar) for representing complex phenomena. The fairytales of the Russian folk heritage are analyzed by using a specific system of conventional symbols to encode the figures and typical situations of these tales. Propp’s hypothesis (the original edition of the book dates from 1927), that all folk tales are particular cases of one single super-tale that covers all of them, revealing deep structures, is argued by comparing the formulae that highlight the structure of each tale. Thus the expression e3k2q2j1X14ZVISmPu indicates that in a certain tale the hero (actually, in this case, a heroine) goes away (e3), and then she is given an order (k2); the order is carried out (q2), and then there is an insidious attempt at persuasion by the antagonist (j1) followed by a killing (X14), but a magic means emerges from the ground (ZVI) and unmasks the antagonist (Sm), who is punished in the end (Pu). On the other hand X10LR2CAN*BI indicates that the hero is abandoned to the water (X10) and goes away (L); then he is transported elsewhere (R2) and is given a difficult task (C) which is resolved (A); the marriage (N*), the return home (B) and the recognition (I) follow. Lower-case letters describe the situation at the start, the initial state of the action. The numbers with exponents differentiate different modes of the same basic functions: thus X stands generically for “damage”, while X1 specifies that it is a case of kidnapping, X2 of loss of the magic helper, X3 of devastation of the harvest and so on. The general form of the super-tale, with a series of particular cases, is presented on pages 145 and 146 of the book (this present exercise could be conceived as a particular case of a superstructure containing all the possible ways of preparing all the possible ingredients). 6. Consignment By the end of the day of 17th March.

[120] Synsemic caponata The workshop entitled Sinsemie (Synsemias) held at the IUAV in Venice in the summer of 2007 by invitation of Giovanni Anceschi, in the context of his New Basic Design program. Here is my preliminary note: “Based on a critique of linearity associated with the alphabet understood as mere transcription of oral discourse, the exercise proposes to explore the “synsemic” potentials

of writing, the ones that arise first of all from its two-dimensional deployment on the support. The participants will be supplied with a procedural sequence (for example, a recipe, a user manual, a narrative fable, etc.): they will have to design a notational system, composed of symbols and aggregative modes, with the objective of configuring a structural synthesis for them. In addition, in a synaesthetic perspective, the symbols may be sound or tactile symbols”. I had then chosen a rather complex recipe by Ada Boni, “Sicilian caponata - San Bernardo sauce”, which could be substituted by the simpler “Caponatina according to the Siracuse custom”, both from the 19th edition of the Talismano della felicità (Roma 1949). Emanuela Bonini Lessing has told the story of the workshop in no. 45 of “Il Verri”, June 2010 (Notazioni sinsemiche di processi interattivi, pp. 85-91). [124] Another caponata The same Sicilian caponata as on the previous pages, in the usual A6 booklets. The final test for the workshop (held with Angelo Monne, Attilio Baghino tutor) is the one on Heart of darkness on p. 80.

between and 1st and 3rd centuries A.D., with the mindset and the attention of the leisurely tourist, it would have appeared to be characterized not only and not so much by statues, temples, public meeting places, colours and traffic, as much as by the writings that were present everywhere, in the squares and in the streets, on walls and in courtyards, painted, etched, engraved, hanging on wooden boards or traced on white square blocks, all very different from each other not just in their appearance but also in their content, being at times for advertising, at other times political, funereal, celebratory, public, private, even for insults or for remembering jokes; and naturally they were aimed, if not exactly at everyone, at a lot of people, and therefore at the many people who could read and were part of the urban community; and, if not exactly produced by everyone, they were certainly produced tangibly by those many people belonging to very diverse social classes; and they were displayed anywhere, with certain preferences, it is true, for some designated places – squares, forums, public buildings and necropolises – but this was only the case for the most solemn ones; the others were scattered indifferently, where there was the entrance to a shop, a quadrivium, or a piece of unadorned plaster at head-height. Armando Petrucci, La scrittura (Public Lettering: Script,Power and Culture) [132] Rione Monti

[126] Engravings on plate 07 Engraved, suspended In these two years, the course I had to teach was that of “history of the decorative arts”. After an introduction to the history of the Latin alphabet, I agreed with the students to have two outings. The first was a visit to the epigraphic section of the Museo Nazionale Romano (Terme di Diocleziano), with its excellent introductory room and a huge series of engravings of various types. I asked the Course secretary’s office in advance to request the Museum’s management for free entrance for teaching purposes; then we went there, several dozen of us, like a teacher with his class of children. The second outing, in batches, was an inspection of the area around the Pantheon (between Piazza della Rotonda, Piazza della Minerva and the atrium on the street of the Sant’Eustachio Basilica), where there is a concentration of writing phenomena with a decidedly high density; those marked on the plan and reproduced on the following pages are a fraction of the total (the location of some of them, it has to be said, is rather approximate and others, after ten years, have been transferred, modified, or have somehow disappeared). To the somewhat diffident amazement of the traders, who noted these indefinable platoons photographing the manhole covers instead of the Pantheon dome, we strolled around signs and obelisks like carefree tourists of writing. For examination, the students then chose an area or a theme and tried to make a small survey of it (pp. 132-35). To anyone who walked around any city of the Roman Empire

[133] Piazza Augusto Imperatore [134] Tiber Island [135] Methods of writing on stone [136] 08 A concise history Ever since it was published in 1994 Richard Hollis’s Graphic design: A concise history has been the best introduction to graphic design of the twentieth century, and it still is today (I would have liked to translate it, for our Stampa Alternativa collection, but Hollis explained to me that the publisher was interested in negotiating the transfer of rights only for the whole collection in which the book appeared). Also excellent are Swiss graphic design (Laurence King and Yale University Press, 2006) and his recent About graphic design (Occasional papers, 2012); his text for the catalogue for the exhibition on Italian graphic art at the 2012 Milan Triennale is without doubt the best in the publication. But Hollis is himself an excellent designer who grew up in that climate of political and cultural effervescence in Great Britain after the Second World War, so well evoked in no. 8 of xxiii

“Typography papers”, entitled Modern typography in Britain. Only a person who has a deep knowledge of its design processes can write convincingly about graphic design and typography; otherwise, as in many cases, one is limited to pseudo-aesthetic evaluations, which are not only useless but also misleading. The students were then in their third year, and I think this individual exercise was the last one before the final examination. I took turns in the workshop with Nino Perrone, Luciano Perondi and Daniele Turchi, and Antonio Perri also joined us in that year. It seemed to us that just reading the book in English – which at least some of them necessarily had to do – was already asking a lot. The size was A4, and I do not think any particular constraints were imposed. [137] On the page on the left, the cover (the subtitle is “a concise summary”). [138] On the facing page, detail of a poster by the same student, who would then further develop the theme in her degree thesis (supervisor Nino Perrone).

computer room of Bari Polytechnic Architecture Faculty, using the online dictionary Zhongwen (www.zhongwen.com). The images reproduced on the facing page and on the following one were shown in order to give a preliminary account of the first experiment to the students of the second; they contain summary hints about Chinese writing and the essential elements in the translation procedure. Both experiments were concluded successfully within the two hours (meaning that most of the students translated the proposed texts). The two characters transliterated in fa¯nyì, “translation”. 1-4. Engraving on bronze – and various calligraphic styles. 5-7. holding the pen and position of the arm and hand (with little finger and ring finger further securing the arrangement) in a German manual of the 16th century, from Wolfgang Fugger’s handwriting manual, Oxford University Press, London 1960; the brush is handled freely in the Chinese tradition. 8, 9. The meticulous analysis of two strokes, and eighteen different types of dot in a modern treatise on calligraphy (Beijing 1983). 10-12. “Grass style” in the works of two Japanese calligraphers, and blades of grass in a Chinese xylograph. 13. A poem by Du Fu (712-770, Tang dynasty) addressed to Li Bo, another great poet of the same period, with transcription in pinyin. 14. The phrase proposed to the students in the first experiment.

[141] [145] A general synoptic representation. [142] 09 Fa¯nyì Chinese writing is still burdened by prejudice and misconceptions that have no other foundation than the pernicious tyranny of the alphabet and the Aristotelian dogma of writing as a pure transcription of the verbal language. Even scholars who are supposed to be learned demonstrate their scanty knowledge of this system and repeat time and time again that Chinese writing is a relic of the past, decidedly non-functional compared with the needs of the modern world, forgetting that the astounding development of recent years, right up to the space program, has been entirely created with that kind of writing. For a more balanced understanding of the question, I recommend the excellent La sfida della scrittura cinese (Chinese writing: the shock of modernity) by the French sinologist Viviane Alleton (Carocci 2012, Italian translation by Antonio Perri). On these pages, two experiments in simultaneous translation, conducted together with Nino Perrone: the first, more familiar one (2004-05) was with just a few students, already in the third year of the Industrial Design degree course, and with paper dictionaries; the second (2005-06) took place with a number of first-year students on the same course, in the xxiv

15. The 400-plus syllables in standard spoken Chinese, the majority of which may then be pronounced in four tones (continuous, rising, falling-rising, falling); different characters with different meanings may correspond to the basic morphemes of the language; but the “words” are largely polysyllabic, mainly two-syllable; the characters, which are all inscribable inside a virtual square, are written without spaces between them, independently of the number of syllables that compose the word. 16. The basic strokes forming the characters, which it essential to be know how to count; it is also necessary to know that Chinese is an uninflected language, meaning that, even less than in English, there are neither declensions nor conjugations, and the meaning is given by the context; depending on its position in the sentence, the same word can succeed in being a noun, adjective, verb or adverb. 17. Most of the characters, in turn, are composed of two or more basic characters, or radicals, which are just over 200 in number; the radical of the character highlighted here, the fourth in the sentence, is the symbol that contains it. 18. Once the radical of the character whose meaning one is seeking has been identified, or at least once one has hypothesized which it might be, one looks for it in the list of radicals (here from the Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary), divided by number of component strokes, in this case, two. 19. Detail of the list of radicals. 20. A serial number corresponds to each radical – in this case, 16; we therefore go from the list of characters, ordered by radicals and, within these, by number of component strokes,

and we identify the character in question to which the relative syllable is associated, with the accent to indicate its tone (tóng). 21. Detail of list of characters. 22. At this point we move on to the actual dictionary, ordered by syllable in alphabetical order and we reach tóng, which may mean “alike”, “together” etc., but a rapid glance at the compound words beginning with this syllable, and at the characters that follow it, leads to a possible compound word that figures in the initial text – tóngxué – meaning “classmate” or “students”; this, with the addition of the syllable men, indicating the plural and which figures three times in the sentence, turns out to be the correct meaning. 23. Detail of the dictionary. 24. The solution to the problem: the sentence with the radical of each character and the compound words highlighted; below, the pronunciation of the syllables, their primary meaning and the meaning of the compound words (the translation is: “Welcome, teachers and students, to today’s meeting”). Below, the text of the second experiment (2006), with the addition of the keys for interpretation. The translation is a short dialogue. First speaker: “Dad says you can to the cinema today”. Reply: “I can’t now, because I’ve got a lesson”. The expression “electric shadows”, for “cinema”, should be noted (at least one female student arrived at the correct meaning independently, from the two individual syllables, before arriving at the compound word. [146] 10 Books, books, books Promoted and directed by Umberto Eco (vice-director Riccardo Fedriga), the master’s course went on from 2001 to 2010, with five two-year cycles containing over 900 hours, and of one sixmonth “stage” term, of around 350 hours). To train operators who could deal with every aspect of work in a publishing house. The subjects taught ranged from philology to publishing legislation, from translation theory to warehouse management, and from photoediting to negotiating rights, etc., in a series of thirty-hour courses. The students, twenty-five in each cycle, could also profit from a large number of lectures organized by the School for advanced humanistic studies, in his or her research activity. I found myself there almost naturally, holding the courses on typography and editorial graphics, because in the previous years I had already held some seminars in the context of Eco’s courses at the University of Bologna. That was without doubt one of the most pleasant situations in my varied teaching experience. Right from the first year, I proposed that for my examination the students should each create a book with characteristics as on the facing page, and in three copies, to prevent an excess of decorativist do-it-yourself handiwork and anticipate a mass print-run. I gave the students a copy of Lettere, lettere, lettere (Letters, letters, letters) – the introduction, in duodecimo format, to

typography on pp. 46-49, originally compiled for them. Also, in the last years, since I had done the layout for it and I therefore had the files, I gave them a copy of the fifty pages of another introduction to typography that I had written, Tipografia e oltre (Typography and beyond) which was published in thr book Culture visive. Contributi per il design della comunicazione (Visual cultures. Contributions for communication design), edited by Valeria Bucchetti (Poli. design, Milan 2007). I then invited them to look at some books that were there in the School library and I brought in others myself to circulate among them. Ten “lessons” of three hours each. At least four were taken up with various guests: each year there was Antonio Perri on Aztec writing (which I have always held to be fundamental) and Marcello Baraghini, on his Stampa Alternativa “Millelire” collection, or on anything else he might consider suitable. Then there was Silvana Amato (papers, booklets and cards), Giovanni De Mauro (the “Internazionale” review), James Mosley (if he happened to be passing through the area), Beppe Chia (Bologna Salaborsa Library) etc. That did not leave much time: starting from the second year at least, we analyzed the books created by the previous course attendees, we looked at a few pictures on typography and graphics, we discussed various matters and we also chatted a lot. The students, on their part, knew absolutely nothing about typography and graphic design, and nor did they have any knowledge of layout programs (in school they had one day, or maybe one and a half, of introduction to Quark XPress). However, they had two essential requisites, without which they would not have been there at all. On the one hand, a strong motivation and a familiarity – certainly not sporadic – with books; on the other, a solid cultural background. The admission selection was, in fact, quite strict: it was unlikely that students could get in without a “cum laude” grade in their degree examination (their high school diploma grade was also assessed) and there were some far from trivial interviews and tests. From my point of view, they were entirely normal, friendly youngsters, not particularly erudite (and certainly not “swots”), but curious and well disposed to receive, procure for themselves, elaborate and rapidly integrate new knowledge. On the following pages, some of their books. Quite a few of them, after thirty hours, can be compared to and are even superior to the final compositions of five years of university communication design courses, with a ratio, in number of hours, of around one to a hundred. So, dear reader, what conclusion do you draw? [147]

Project for the editorial graphics examination Instructions xxv

Creation, by each student, of 3 copies of an editorial artefact with the following characteristics: 12 x 18 cm square edged vertical format; at least 48 pages; printing in black only; arranged in stitched octavo or 16mo. No constraint is given, however, with regard to the following: Choice of texts and any illustrations; type of paper; making-up and cover. It is understood that there is virtually no limit to the number of copies printable with mass production processes. In particular, the copies will therefore be: a) printed directly from file to digital printer; b) or produced in b&w photocopy from master created as desired. The making-up – the responsibility of the student (including binding) – will be the same for the 3 copies. The artefact will contain a text that gives reasons for the choices made. The student’s name will be shown clearly.

It comprises seven propositions, as reproduced alongside on the booklet’s cover (the last one, literally ineffable, says: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”). Each of the propositions, with the exception of the seventh, is then followed by a variable number of sub-propositions, up to six different levels. It is therefore a tree structure, which would need a surface of a few square metres to be presented as such. In this booklet, the text runs on odd-numbered pages, with tabulations that highlight the level of articulation, while the local map is shown on the even-numbered pages.

Recommendations

[152]

The following will be appreciated: structural complexity, reduced to formal simplicity; attempts to configure the space of the book in relation “to the tensile stresses and pressure of the contents” (El Lissitsky); care in choosing, with reasons, if possible, the fonts (and use of appropriate printer); care in the treatment of texts, and in particular of the typographical details (small capitals, ligatures, spacing between letters and words, etc.); treatment of any illustrations to give an appropriate effect; presence of tables, diagram, maps etc.; presence of devices (notes, summaries, bibliographies, analytical indices, translations etc.); care in the physical creation.

Roman Jakobson L’arte della parola (The art of the word)

The last master’s degree cycle in the school’s Sala Rossa (there’s an odd-man-out here: little Martino, just a few weeks old, in his mother’s arms). [148] Stanzas. Metric exemplification Metric “mute” manual, the most moderate one possible in supplying clarifications in a discursive, verbal form, but one able to make certain percepts emerge.

[150] Right, how the same propositions on the page above were presented, in an inexorably sequential arrangement, in the first edition of the Tractatus in English, published in London in 1922. On the facing page, below, the last pages of the text and the bookmark with instructions for use.

An essay by the great Russian linguist on the visionary German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. A rather racy treatment of the text, as we can see. Above: the first page of Jakobson’s text in the Melangolo edition (Genoa 1979). Below: the corresponding page in the “master’s edition”. [154] Xiàngqí. Gli scacchi cinesi (Chinese chess) The author of this book is not a professional, much less an expert in xiàngqí, Chinese chess, but only an unskilful, occasional player [...] I have put in everything I know about it, which little more than the basic moves and some endgames [...] The game was taught to me by the janitor of a hotel in Beijing, in the basement, and by a British teacher with whom I passed the nights. My sporadic playmates were: strangers on the train, Tanzanians who had been in China for years acting as DJs in provincial towns, jazz trumpeters and philosophers from Trieste and Norwegian physicists and fencers. I owe my luck in having met these extraordinary characters to xiàngqí.

A fine tale about Chinese chess is Acheng’s King of Chess, part of a trilogy that also includes King of Children and King of Trees.

[149] Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus logico-philosoficus

[155]

This text – its name is derived from Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus – is one of the most crucial of the twentieth century and was published in the original German in 1921.

The booklet’s dust jacket, below, comprises the unusual chessboard, with the “river” in the middle. The black and white pieces for playing can be cut from the flaps.

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[156] Danilo Trombin Come ad Ash-shuwaymiyyah (As at Ash-shuwaymiyyah) The book is a travel tale and was later published, with the same title and essentially identical in layout, by the publisher Apogeo (Adria), ISBN 88-88786-29-5. [170] Dizionario incompleto dei vincoli oulipiani (Incomplete dictionary of OuLiPo constraints) The lively, unceasing activity of the OuLiPo [Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle – Workshop of Potential Literature] is reported on these pages in the form of a dictionary that explains all the constraints, the rules, the linguistic games and the paths of meaning created by the French group starting from 1960 [...] Looking carefully at the illustrious writers, poets and intellectuals who have in the past tackled the amusing problem of Italian translation, this project aims to summarize, in an ironic but informed way, the current state of the art [...] Warning before consulting: I. The dictionary is deliberately called “incomplete”, in the hope that during the days, months and years to come, the movement’s creativity will always remain compulsively active and that it will never finally (completely) come to an end. II. Some of the entries in this dictionary have a very close link with the culture and language of the original context. In these cases I preferred to show some French texts and examples, sometimes placing alongside them a possible analogy with the Italian. III. The author is known for only some of the constraints, and only in these cases is the author’s name inserted in the definition.

[1508 Ágota Kristóf Il grande quaderno (The Notebook) Published in Italian also as Quello che resta, this is the first book in the Trilogy of the city of K. by this Hungarian writer. The illustrations are by Elena Orlandi herself. I first chose the book [...] strong, dark but full of images, and unforgettable [...] I immediately thought of the effect I wanted the writing to create on the page, which had to be black, thick and full... I looked at old books for children, and I understood that that was the effect I wanted to obtain [...] I created a leftaligned layout with quite narrow side margins and the bottom and top margins quite wide, and with centred titles, again to give the idea of a handwritten notebook [...] I put in some pictures: on re-reading the text I decided to draw some passages and I took the liberty of thinking that the same thing happened to the twins – the main characters in the book, while they were writing their story. [...] I used fine-lined exercise book paper, very simple, unnamed cardboard for the endpapers, black cardboard for the cover, and parcel paper for the reinforcements. I stuck my fingers together with Vinavil, glue paste and spray glue; I plaited them with red polyester thread. I finished the spine with 38 mm-

wide plasticized cloth adhesive tape. I risked my mental sanity and destroyed other books to make this one, but I am satisfied with the result.

[160] William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream The performance that gave rise to this book was staged by the then Compagnia di San Giacomo in June 2004 [...] The aim of this work is to make it immediately understandable how the work was staged [...] On the odd-numbered pages there is the actual text, with full captions indicating the intentions with which the characters pronounce the speeches, and the associated lights and music; on the even-numbered pages there is the diagram of the staging of the same extract [...] On the left, therefore, the speeches of the moving characters follow the ideal line of movement, while those pronounced from a static position are composed in small blocks [...] If a character is on stage and does not speak, the symbol indicating this is in grey [...] At the beginning of each line there is a small black square, to indicate the direction of movement.

[161] William Shakespeare The Tempest In order to choose the numerous typefaces suitable for the characters of Shakespeare’s The Tempest auditions had to be organized, lasting for a few days. We were proud to note how successful our announcement had been: we had managed to mobilize a large group of aspiring characters, young and old, experimental and classically noble. They were there, in front of us, silent and full of expectation, with their fonts more or less complete. Thinking about it, we were more excited than they were: the choice required us to expend a lot of energy [...] We have only a very little space here to congratulate all the other characters that played with us, but our memory has recorded them and sometimes we still see the world through them. [...] Double thread stitched book, not done by cheating but with the greatest diligence. Red and black thread donated by Mastro Calzolaio in Via Rialto, the best in Bologna.

[162] The Constitution according to me From the back cover: [...] a disturbing text: the Italian Constitution. The Constitution - disturbing? Yes, because in this typographical interpretation the fundamental text of the Italian people emerges in all its peremptory radical intentions. Thanks to the graphic solutions adopted, readers can understand the strength of the constitutional principles, the xxvii

delicate balance between rights and duties, and the unceasing work of rewriting that has for decades been devoted to regulating the State.

[164]

To reach the lowest possible consultability level and reduce the degree of intersubjective verifiability, certain strict criteria were used. [...] At the end of the book two complete interpretations of the poem are supplied in the two languages, created by choosing some definitions absolutely at random and linking them in the way that was most correct and expedient.

Index auctorum et librorum The first edition (the “Pauline Index”) of the famous Index of Prohibited Books, published in Rome in 1559 under Pope Paul IV by the Congregation of the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church, or Holy Office.

[168]

[165]

The text was structured according to a “matrix” system. Five macro-sections were identified according to the logicalargumentative progression, represented by the five bars placed along the bottom margin. Each of the these sections is in turn divided into content subsets, marked by indicators on the side margin. The logical structure and the graphic structure therefore mirror each other. The level of progression of the text is given by the intersection of two bands that “cage” the page, projecting a graphic element that is constantly represented to the reader’s eyes [...] I tried to set as clear a visual structure as possible against the semantic complexity of the text.

Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma Lost in Waterloo Two chapters from The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. I have conveyed Fabrice del Dongo’s route on a line at the bottom of the page: from south (on the left) to north (on the right). The geographical positions on this line are not fixed, because they are an abstraction that should mainly provide the reader with an approximate position – an attempt to tell him or her continuously (as on the maps scattered around Bologna): you are here. The only fixed coordinate is the border between Italy and the rest of Europe, represented by the fold in the pages. [...] Our tutor wheedled out the secret of sewing books from a printing firm in Bologna, and passed it on in a fabulous lesson in the computer room – a fact for which she is still being investigated by the professional association of bookbinders.

Plato The Sophist

The pictures are details of engravings by Max Klinger. The book appeared published by Sirat Al Bunduqiyyah, which in Arabic is the Favola di Venezia (Fable of Venice, Hugo Pratt, 1976). [169] Edwin A. Abbott Flatland

[166] Corpo 12 (12-point body text) Booklet à rebours (the page numbering goes from 48 to 1, and that of the chapters from 7 to 0), telling the story of his own dealings. [167] Das Grande Laloola Dictionary The dictionary refers to a famous nonsense poem by Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914). This uses a nonsense vocabulary that operates on individual words in a completely wandering way, working through phonetic associations. Each word goes through two explanatory phases. In the first, according to Lewis Carroll’s thesis of portmanteau words, it is decomposed into its possible main associations. In the second, some or all of these associations are lumped together to give rise to some possible definition. The dictionary is bilingual and, since Morgenstern is German, each word is examined in English and in Italian. xxviii

The main aim was to give a different voice to poor Square trapped in the novel. The strict balance of the text is offset by the style of the illustrations, which I created ad hoc; they were designed to be in a dialectical relationship with the text, and are differentiated from the cold, geometric severity of the original ones. All the illustrations are designed to be the result of the main character’s idleness in prison, and this is also the justification for inserting the spots scattered over the text. It might perhaps have been more fitting for the book to be in a square format, which could have represented tangibly the voice of the main actor as well. I tried to create an interpretation of the idea expressed by the work, in particular the possibility it suggests of somewhere else.

[170] 11 Typography? I was, certainly, very involved in typography.

As a boy – it must have been in 1963 – I was enchanted by Issue 8, second series, of Herbert Spencer’s “Typographica”, which I found by chance in the art and architecture bookshop in Via dell’Oca in Rome, with articles on Paul Schuitema and concrete poetry. I then kept on reading the review right up to the last issue, number 16, in 1967, which included Kurt Schwitters on a timechart by Stefan Themerson, an extraordinary work that I later published, almost thirty years after, in “Progetto grafico” (no. 4-5, February 2005). In the meantime, I got hold of the previous numbers and, maybe in 1965, I read James Mosley’s The nymph and the grot, a fundamental, incomparable story of the appearance of sans serif characters at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which I then translated into Italian (more than thirty years later). I also chanced upon “Neue Grafik”, the Swiss review by Hans Neuburg and partners (1958-65), and I gradually put together the complete series of this as well. In 1967, in the large Hoepli bookshop in Rome I picked up Asymmetric typography by Jan Tschichold, which had just come out and, two years later, again in the Via dell’Oca bookshop – and who known how it got there – Schrift im Bauhaus. Die Futura von Paul Renner by Hans Peter Willberg, a valuable critique of Bauhaus typography which I got very accurately translated, given my scant knowledge of German. In 1972 Stanley Morison’s great Politics and script came out, published posthumously and edited by Nicholas Barker. And, being a complete autodidact, it is Morison and Tschichold whom I consider to be my real teachers. Aided by these and many other things which I started, hesitatingly, to order from the Anglo-American Bookshop in Via della Vite, I began to reflect, slowly and at length on formalism in the rationalist movement. I convinced myself that without typography there is no communication design. Only the control of typography ensures the precondition for a design that starts from a message; otherwise, as in many areas of rationalist graphics, it is only a question of a “minor picture gallery”, as Gillo Dorfles wrote – of a small decorative art. The comparison between “Typographica” and “Neue Grafik” was in itself a revelation. Both of them respond to the common need for reorganizing experiences of artistic avant-garde movements in the previous decades according to the new communication requirements in Europe after the Second World War. But while, at first sight, the first, British, one was brightly coloured, flexible in its layout and in unjustified typographic setting, often with imaginative enclosures, the second, Swiss, one was frosty, rigid, uniform, and composed with fixed justification in narrow columns, and therefore with irregular spacing between the words. Getting down to contents, “Typographica” ranged around the world and the universe: Franco Grignani, Antonio Boggeri and Max Huber were there, yes, but also Eric Gill and Germano Facetti and Robert Massin and Raymond Queneau, and then there were the directional arrows in the Chinese tradition, Nicolete Gray’s studies on lettering, Braille, Hebrew calligrammes, characters for typewriters, and Themerson and Mosley. “Neue Grafik” was what it was, programmatically useful only

for the commercial graphics of those years, dogmatic in its defence of rationalist schematism as the only representation of modernity, but it was shrewd and informed, it must be said, by comparison with the fairly obtuse Helvetica-centred orthodoxy I heard repeated ad nauseam in a long exploratory trip I made to Milan in the early Seventies. The impassioned, highly competent review by Emil Ruder of Adrian Frutiger’s Univers in no. 2 of 1959, or the tepid reception given to Helvetica by Hans Neuburg in no. 4 (“We, however, will happily continue to use Akzidenz Grotesk”) is sufficient proof. It has now been clear for a long time that the purported efficiency of rationalist graphic art was nothing more than a formalistic, aestheticizing choice: of those cages, to quote Bertolt Brecht, only the wind blowing through them will remain. [171] As soon as Farsi un libro (Making oneself a book, 1990) came out, in which I had written the part about typefaces, Piero De Macchi, a veteran of Italian typography who had worked with Aldo Novarese, promptly looked me up and persuaded me to go with him to Lurs, to the week of the Rencontres internationales de Lure. I finally met Mosley and Colin Banks there and they became my very dear friends for many years, introducing me to that international typographical environment that I was part of for a long time. I enthusiastically welcomed digital typography, which finally provided tools for controlling communication design. Daniele Turchi and I were among the first to purchase both Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Garamond and Fontographer, and I well remember the genuine euphoria with which we directly experimented in what was our main interest, word processing. However, the rapid spread of digital typography produced, just as rapidly, a new type of mannerism, which the orthogonality of typesetting with lead, at least, did not allow to be practised with such freedom. It was hailed as the “democratization” of typography, and year after year it produced only an infinite multiplication of fonts and decorative characters after decorative characters after decorative characters; this was fine in many ways, because in the best cases it brought in a touch of liveliness to break up the sad schemes of rationalism, but one had difficulty in seeing applications that were not ultimately futile. The entire world of graphic art and of design, on the other hand, knew nothing at all about the parallel development of Donald Knuth’s TEX, relegated to the ghetto of scientific environments and which Daniele and I had almost furtively caught a glimpse of. So something was not right. The Metafont, which Knuth had developed to support TEX, indicated a path. And here on page 178, after having skipped one hundred and fifty-three pages, we take up again the story we left off on page 25. Apart from those presented on the following pages, I was also in charge of other courses in type design. The students in a workshop at the Rome La Sapienza university (1999-2000), for example, who had happily indulged their xxix

whims with the weirdest (and also rather unattractive, as a typography purist would say) characters, had to compose for the examination, each with his or her own character in 16-pt body, a given file of text in A4 format. I recall how surprised I was to find that almost all these sheets, even those with deliberately irregular characters, were essentially highly legible. Oh Morison, Morison! Still at La Sapienza, for several years after I had stopped teaching there, the students from the LUDI (University degree in industrial design) course who wanted to tackle the design of fonts applied to me. I thus found myself being co-supervisor for the degree projects of some young people who I would at least like to mention here: Enrico Baldetti, Stefano Cremisini, Elena Damato, Lorenza De Agostini, Alessio D’Ellena, and Cira Viggiano. In Alghero, on the Industrial Design degree course at Sassari University, I took charge, with Angelo Monne and with Attilio Baghino as tutor, of a workshop of do-it-yourself typography (2009-10), from which the images on this page derive. The students had to build, with any materials they liked, actual fonts (“types”) to print a given text with. A two-day session was held in that workshop, with enormous success, by Claude Marzotto Caotorta, author of Proto tipi (Proto types) (Viterbo 2007).

Ricci), which can definitely be called the first in type design in Italian universities, and perhaps the first of this kind ever held in Italy. The starting point was the analysis of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent’s Times New Roman (as we can see, we moved away considerably from this starting point). The students, in groups (or more accurately, in hordes) worked with Fontographer. Guests of the workshop were James Clough, Piero De Macchi and Anna Ronchi. Three of the fonts displayed here have already been presented in my book La lettera uccide (pp. 78-83) and I can unfortunately give the names only of the students responsible for these. [175] Workshop of 150 hours held with Mario Piazza and Daniele Turchi (50 hours each, subject experts Manuela Rattin and Matteo Ricci). The theme here was more specific: it was a matter of creating very legible characters in 4-pt body, which could be used, for example, for telephone directories. Daniele Turchi wrote a clear and exhaustive account of this, published in “Notizie Aiap” no. 10, June 2000. The students’ first names in this case will be found in the index of names on p. 182.

[172] [176] One of several exercises in approach to typography, at a time when students who had a computer were in a clear minority.

Workshop held with Daniele Turchi, Nino Perrone, Luciano Perondi and Liborio Biancolillo.

The configuration given in the grid alongside (in Adobe Garamond Italic) must be reproduced by assigning to each of the 448 squares a value chosen from the following four: a) white; b) light grey; c) dark grey; d) black. The technique used for shading in the squares must allow the greys to be evident in the photocopy. The basic grid must not be reproduced. The final composition must be on white A4 paper. The configuration thus created must correspond perceptually, from a distance of 5-8 m. to the starting one. A mechanical arrangement of the problem (assigning to each square a value proportional to the amount of black in the given configuration) does not necessarily lead to a perfect perceptual representation.

[177]

The originals of the starting configuration and of the different treatments are 50%. The reductions on the facing page, top, which are obviously purely indicative because of the further presence of the print screen, are by 3%.

[178]

A type design course held in close collaboration with Antonio Perri, who held one in semiology applied to typography. The students therefore had to design a font and at the same time a notational device that would demonstrate its properties. The font system on this page is inspired by a character designed by the Scottish calligrapher Tom Gourdie in 1965 for learning in Swedish elementary schools. Lines of different thickness and different inclinations are applied on the basic structure, in the FontLab application, to obtain a huge range of variants. This system is the point of transit between the variability obtained with essentially calligraphic procedures and the mathematical-programming approach of the parametric font on the following page.

Controforma Type design workshop held with Michele Patanè, subject expert, and Luciano Perondi.

[174] Workshop of 150 hours held with Mario Piazza (100 hours Lussu, 50 Piazza, subject experts Manuela Rattin and Matteo xxx

Our aim was to have the counter emerge on the printed paper – the counterform of the letter, i.e. that “void” created by the chisel which is just as important as the positive form for

identifying the different letters. [...] We then went on to an analysis phase, examining fonts of different types and different historical periods in order to study the changes in the counterforms and sizes. [...] After the analysis, we turned our attention to the world of type design and visual communication, collecting some useful hints and suggestions. [...] The design phase got under way, taking Gill Sans as a starting point for defining the “negative” font; this design method was then abandoned in favour of an approach that was less tied to the influence of already known and assimilated forms.

The intervention by Roberto Arista, entitled Parametric Typography as a Didactic Method, was published in the papers of the meeting, signed by Arista himself, by Alessio D’Ellena and by Luciano Perondi: Quelhas, V., Marques, H. T., Mendonça, R., III Encontro de Tipografia: Livro de Atas, Porto Polytechnic, Porto 2012, ISBN 978-989-20-3439-3. [181] So it goes on... Communication by Luciano Perondi 21st March 2013, at 21:19:13 “Below is a summary of the significant phases in the project:

[179]

Summary of current state (Academy/ISIA)

On this page, the Controforme program, here reduced just to the letter “e”. The program, written in Guido van Rossum’s Python, the resident Macintosh language, makes use of the RoboFab application (by Erik van Blokland, Tal Leming and Just van Rossum) to generate the fonts in FontLab.

1) When the experience at Milan Polytechnic came to an end, I started to apply the parametric method to teaching typography in the first year of the ISIA and Academy three-year course, which seemed to me to be the ideal teaching situation for dealing with this theme: enquiring into the mathematical relationship between the forms of a character and trying to reproduce it with a parametric algorithm seemed the best way to tackle the problem of a first approach to typography. The results were independent of a student’s basic preparation; some significant evolutions were worked out by students without any training either in the typographic field, or in mathematics, or in computers.

In the initial phase of this path, which started in 2006, as mentioned on page 25, the reference was Donald Knuth’s Metafont. In the opening section of issue no. 20 of June 2011 of “Progetto grafico” (“Mathematics and design” by Luciano Perondi and Maria Rosaria Digregorio, with written pieces by Igino Marini, Michele Patanè, Alessandro Tartaglia and me) suggestions for a mathematical approach to typography can be found annexed to the issue, extracted from Knuth’s Tipografia matematica. This ur-e, now finally emancipated from any calligraphic reference, is the point of arrival of three years of research and workshop experimentation. It is worth emphasizing that this is completely original research, which did not at the time – and indeed does not seem even now – to have any equivalent in any other design school in the world. Research and experimentation carried out, one might say, in the face of a fairly lukewarm interest on the part of the academic institution. But the story goes on (see next page).

2) I therefore started from where we had left off at the Polytechnic, that is, from defining characters starting from the counters, since this seemed the more advanced solution and one that was free from the calligraphic process, which was too conditioning in design. 3) The students immediately tried to draw the black forms directly, without going from the counterform, by simplifying the drawing and using only orthogonal manipulators. 4) We then worked with the students on defining a number of basic components drawn only with orthogonal manipulators; with these components it would be possible to make an approximation of any form and carry out diagonal lines with cutting interventions and possible waste.

In relation to point 5, a subsequent message (25th March 2013) announces that “the independent variables have become 33 this morning, thanks to a more or less fortuitous discovery by one student”.

5) Alongside this, the course concentrated on isolating and studying the relationship between the independent variables, which serve to define the appearance of a character from the user side, and therefore taking into account perceptual distortions that define the effective sizes of a character. The course then concentrated on studying the functions linking the variables. At the present time (March 2013), thirty independent variables have been identified, which would potentially allow more than 10^31 fonts, metrically distinct from each other, to be generated. We presume that at least 50 independent variables can be identified and formalized.

At point 7, it is meant the III Typography Meeting organized in Porto (Portugal) by Porto Polytechnic (Visual Arts, Music School and Art Department) in 2012.

6) Some students have made an exceptional contribution to the development of the workshop: a. algorithms for calculating curves passing through two and

[180] Notes By Academy, it is meant the Urbino Academy of Fine Arts; by ISIA, the Urbino ISIA.

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three points have been worked out – 2011; b. functions have been studied to connect components designed separately and subjected to transformations – 2010; c. an algorithm to balance the spaces between letters starting from the integral of the space at the sides of a letter – 2011; d. the way in which the axis of a glyph can be oriented (by moving the weights), without having recourse to a calligraphic model, has been formalized – 2012; e. Roberto Arista is working out, for the three-year diploma thesis, an automatic analyzer of characters capable of detecting some of the main typographical variables in a given character. The data collected are subjected to a statistical study to find important uniformities. 7) The course was presented in Porto, Portugal, by Roberto Arista in the autumn of 2012. 8) All the scripts from all the examinations are available to all students during the course; a website in which all the scripts are assembled and made available with GPL licence is under construction. 9) Frederik Berlaen has made RoboFont licences available free of charge for the course. 10) New and amazing metatypographical hypotheses are forming on the horizon, and the future is rosy. [183] Index of names [186] Published writings Periodicals [188] Various collections [189] Individual publications Translations

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