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A New Alphabet
Language, Embodiment, & Digital Literacy
e-book by Jeanie Dean
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A New Alphabet - Language Icons The Embodiment of Digital Literacy A New Alphabet e-book by Jean Dean is a literary cultural critique exploring theories of embodiment in language, new media and digital culture in an alphabet book of digital art, collage, essay and poetry. Iconographic and pictorial language is an emergent standard of post modern text. This book illustrates this reading standard in visual essays and poems. The visual text uses metaphors of the body as icons of the body and embodied text. Digital art images are the background skin of the page or screen surface. Iconographic language is intuitive and non-rational, therefore each alphabet letter is composed of poetry as a typography of textual embodiment. Text and alphabets are written as pictorial objects to illustrate an interaction with theories of embodiment. Icons were created from paintings and photography of the body in the fine-art western tradition as the basic visual layer for A NEW ALPHABET.

The digital age fosters digital literacy. In the twenty-first century the internet has become a reservoir for digitized art images. Experimental formats in page design and assemblage of image and text in this critical work, demonstrate new iconographic reading and writing as digital literacy. More than the ability to operate a computer, a camera, a microphone, audio-video recording devices and players, digital literacy involves the recognition of a language of signs and icons. The digital era also transfers the human from analog (continuous wave energy) to digital (synchronous binary patterns) in both the perception and the production of consciousness. Digital literacy occurs with the acquisition of new lexicons or (matrices) of shared meaning, by encoding iconographic or visual and linguistic content into memory, with signifying values. As George Lakoff’s metaphor theory posits, these iconographic signs are often derived from mass culture and other collective experiences, which are shared and commonly recognized. Within this matrix of collectivity there are divergent unities of age, generation, cultural interest, ethnic and geographic belonging.

What is the path from image to meaning? A new literacy evokes a new alphabet. Recent theory focuses on the body of text and the text as body. Such inquires evolved from an interest in the relationship of language to thought production and neural processes of consciousness. Other inquiry examines text and textual embodiment by way of archeological recovery of the history of typography, printing, language migration, cryptography, translation, and media production. A New Alphabet reviews the idea of the body as the writing surface.. The two dimensional plane of rendition is the body surface for text and image display. Prior to the digital era, visual content --written, figurative and stage tableaus were recorded and displayed on a two dimensional (2D) flat surface. High definition digital (HDD) imaging can record and represent a visual scene in a full 360 degree perspective. In the digital recording process the 2D plane is unnecessary because image content is stored as sampled coded data in an unbounded storage space called a file.

The flat plane of the film surface, the canvas and the printer platen are obsolete. However, the flat surface of the screen, paper, canvas and proscenium stage continues to be the plane of projection for display of writing, art, and moving pictures (television, film). New visual display formats include animated text or cinetypography, hypertext, holographic projection, circular screens and virtual reality environments. Even as this study proposes an evolving alphabet of iconographic forms, that mix multiple media and perceptual matter, the two dimensional plane of rendition upon which this alphabet is presented and rendered, perhaps faces extinction if not reconfiguration.

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