December 26, 2007
X writing Y because Z
Been thinkin' a lot about techniques for extra-subjective representation.
The NASA Voyager "Golden Record" is an elegant example to follow: Dr. Carl Sagan and friends got together in the 70's with the goal of creating a best-approximation record of life on earth (for intelligent beings in space). In the book, Murmurs of Earth, Sagan and the Voyager team describe the epistemological problems that face any aspiring summarizer of society: the balance between over-specification and genericization.
There seem to be two approaches to this encyclopedic middle ground: the diversity of specimen and the universality of a given example. I have previously addressed the question of subject matter diversity, but for reasons relating to a current project, I have been researching universal (extra-subjective) representation. I am looking at gestures and behaviors and assigning metasyntactic variables. Converting from the form "Jeff drank water from a cup" to "X drank Y from a Z" is simple enough, but representing the XYZ form on film has proven difficult. It seems that movies don't quite work like linguistic exercises.