* <<F6R.1233>> re: [[F6N.1381]]

[Working space. This entry is anachronistic.]


This is an Okidata Microline 92 (µ92), a dot-matrix printer.  There
are more notable specimens of the genus, but this one has personal
significance for me as it was my first printer.

The mechanism has reached certain physical limitations on its
development.  Pin size limits the mechanical design, as pins below a
certain threshold are too fragile to allow the speed and reliability
that the machines' users expect; and that limitation also imposes a
limit on the quality of print.  With pin size stuck at 1/72nd of an
inch, print resolutions higher than that will always suffer from an
unwanted granularity.

Drawing, painting, writing, printing – these can all be abstracted
into a tripartite system of INSTRUMENT / MEDIUM / MATRIX. [I'm not
sold on the terminology.  Maybe 'messenger', 'medium',  and 'matrix'
– the three Ms.]

Instrumentation is used to impregnate the matrix with medium?
There's certainly a sexual character to the system, especially when
using terminology like that.

INSTRUMENTS effect change in MEDIA; media is held in stasis by a
MATRIX.

Writing is drawing. Typing is printing. Printing is mechanized
drawing.

We think of writing as recording THOUGHT, but this is really a
high-level view. The only thing that writing records, when you remove
the semiotic value of the symbols, is the action of an instrument
upon a medium.

Printing mechanizes drawing by using matrices ~as~ instruments.  A
full printing plate is a complete image or image-plane matrix. Cast
type, typebars, are character matrices. A dot-matrix pin is, itself,
a pixel matrix.

The inked ribbon is a damned ingenious invention.  Starting with
intaglio printing, you've got a process in which media must first be
transferred to an instrument, then that instrument is used to
transfer the media into a matrix. The stamp-pad is a clever method of
simplifying the process of transferring media onto the instrument,
but it remains a two-transfer process.   The inked ribbon, though, is
some truly inspired thinking: rather than transfer the media to the
instrument, then transfer the media AGAIN to the matrix, simply hold
the media in stasis and use the instrument to effect a single
transfer.

Message propagation. Communication.

A message can be formalized in a sound, a gesture, a thought, but
before it can become a static thing, a printed thing, it must be
formalized or symbolized – a SCHEME is needed by which a message
may be MEDIATED.

[Message?  Messenger?  Maybe not appropriate, here; the division of
FORM and CONTENT comes into play.  A message necessarily has content,
while the action of an instrument upon a medium may only communicate
form without any intended signification.]

Typing is printing: this is as true with a computer as it is with a
typewriter. A typebar effects the deposition of media in a
symbol-form upon a paper-matrix. A keystroke effects the deposition
of a symbol-sequence into a memory-matrix.

Carving, sculpture, engraving – in these systems, the medium and
the matrix are one; instrumentation (knife, gouge, finger, whatever)
effects change in the matrix itself.

The matrix is a key element – the ability to hold messages in
stasis ...

Performance – speech, song, dance, thought – in purely physical
terms, one might say that these things are mediated by light or air,
and that analog television and radio are re-mediation into
electricity ... but that's not the kind of mediation I'm intersted
in.  I'm interested in ...symbolic mediation?

Writing is drawing.  Writing is SYMBOL-drawing.  Writing is language
schematized for mediation as FORM, and drawing is form mediated
through gesture.

Drawing has no inherent semiotic content, so is non-schematic.
Drawing is elementally formal – there is no MESSAGE in drawing,
only in what one draws.

Perhaps this is what attracts me to the dot-matrix printer: because
the presence of the mechanism is overt in the print. High-quality
inkjet and laser printers are more-or-less transparent; when you look
at them you see the printed image, not the distortions imposed upon
the image by the machine.  With more primitive devices, the mechanism
becomes an actor in the creation of a document.  Typewriters, impact
printers, plotters, mimeographs – their character comes through in
the documents they produce.  Inkjets have no character.  Very high
quality offset printing has no character.

Also, beyond having a certain æsthetic character,

--
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©2015 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <[email protected]>