Through the links fed into my lifestream earlier, I have been led to beautiful visualisations of Kerouac’s On the road designed and drawn by Stefanie Posavec. The starting point was a rigorous analysis of the text for various syntactic and prosodic features, which then were transformed into intricate,  ginkgo-like patterns or more geometrical structures of entangled lines. The complexity of the visual mappings reflects the complex subject matter of the book, ‘a mysterious, semi-nomadic subculture dramatically at variance with the conformist and materialistic American culture of the 1950s’ (http://www.ontheroad.org/). Similarly to Sal and Dean who are in quest of God and Kerouac who is experimenting with the writing style, a few decades later Posavec seeks a different kind of truth and discovers it in her  innovative and aesthetically remarkable ways.

George Dyson (from another lifestream feed) repeats after Barricelli that we might not recognize life or intelligence when we saw it, because our definitions of what it takes to be alive or intelligent were so narrow. Perhaps the same could be said about the way we perceive representation. ‘On the map’ by Prosavec makes me think how much we are tied to textuality and how this inclination ingrained in us for centuries might narrow our perception of visual literacy.

Essay Visions

PS I wonder what my blog postings could look like or even the final essay -