As the devil sticks his flag into the mud
Medieval Europe. One of the darkest periods known to mankind: Pestilence and plague, darkness and fear, witch-hunts and illiteracy roam the land. It is a world where most people seldom leave their place of birth for any distance longer than 10 miles, where few people even live beyond the age of 30. In this inhospitable milieu, secluded in the scriptoria of cold monasteries, under the light of feeble oil lamps, mittened against the biting cold; some of the greatest book designers that ever lived, created some of the most beautiful books the world has ever seen. The colophons of their creations are testimony to their short lives since most of the books that they worked upon were only completed in several of their brief lifetimes, one scribe replacing the other over decades. We call these beautiful books Illuminated Manuscripts.
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration or illustration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniatures. In the strictest definition of the term, an illuminated manuscript only refers to manuscripts decorated with gold or silver. However, in both common usage and modern scholarship, the term is now used to refer to any decorated manuscript.
The earliest surviving substantive illuminated manuscripts are from the period AD 400 to 600, primarily produced in Ireland, Italy and other locations on the European continent. The meaning of these works lies not only in their inherent art history value, but in the maintenance of a link of literacy. Had it not been for the (mostly monastic) scribes of late antiquity, the entire content of western heritage literature from Greece and Rome could have perished. The very existence of illuminated manuscripts as a way of giving stature and commemoration to ancient documents may have been largely responsible for their preservation in an era when barbarian hordes had overrun continental Europe. (…)
A scriptorium (plural scriptoria) was a room devoted to the hand-lettered copying of manuscripts. Before the invention of printing by moveable type, a scriptorium was a normal adjunct to a library. In the monasteries, the scriptorium was a room, rarely a building, set apart for the professional copying of manuscripts. The director of a monastic scriptorium was the armarius or scrittori, who provided the scribes with their materials and directed the process. Rubrics and illuminations were added by a separate class of specialists. (…)
Johannes Gutenberg (1398 - 1468) was a German goldsmith and inventor who achieved fame for his invention of the technology of printing with movable types during 1447. Gutenberg has often been credited as being the most influential and important person of all times, with his invention occupying similar status.
Block printing, whereby individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them, was first recorded in Chinese history, and was in use in East Asia long before Gutenberg. By the 12th and 13th centuries, many Chinese libraries contained tens of thousands of printed books. The Chinese and Koreans knew about moveable metal type at the time, but because of the complexity of the movable type printing it was not as widely used as in Renaissance Europe.
It is not clear whether Gutenberg knew of these existing techniques, or invented them independently, although the former is considered unlikely because of the substantial differences in technique. Some also claim that the Dutchman Laurens Janszoon Coster was the first European to invent movable type.
{ The History of Visual Communication, The Art of Book/The Printing Press | Citrinitas | Wikipedia }
video { François Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451, 1966 | watch the video | adapted from Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian soft science fiction novel authored by Ray Bradbury and first published in 1953. | 451 degrees Fahrenheit (about 233°C) is stated as “The temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns …” | A dystopia is the vision of a society that is the opposite of utopia. A dystopian society is one in which the conditions of life are miserable, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution. }
The installation ‘bios [bible]’ consists of an industrial robot, which writes down the bible on rolls of paper.
The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. It creates the text step by step, like a monk in the scriptorium.
Starting with the old testament and the books of Moses ‘bios [bible]’ produces within seven month continuously the whole book. All 66 books of the bible are written on rolls and then retained and presented in the library of the installation.
November 14th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Canonical graphic design history is rife with errors, and this History of Visual Communication website unfortunately perpetuates them. Looking at just one of the claims in the above quoted passage, a rebuttal:
“The House of Wisdom (Arabic: بيت الحكمة; Bait al-Hikma) was a key institution in the Translation Movement - a library and translation institute in Abbassid-era Baghdad, Iraq.[1] It is considered to have been a major intellectual center of the Islamic Golden Age. The House of Wisdom acted as a society founded by Abbasid caliphs Harun al-Rashd and his son al-Ma’mun who reigned from 813-833 CE. Based in Baghdad from the 9th to 13th centuries, many of the most learned Muslim scholars were part of this excellent research and educational institute. In the reign of al-Ma-mun, observatories were set up, and The House was an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and for sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, zoology and geography. Drawing on Persian, Indian and Greek texts—including those of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Plotinus, Galen, Sushruta, Charaka, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta—the scholars accumulated a great collection of knowledge in the world, and built on it through their own discoveries. Baghdad was known as the world’s richest city and centre for intellectual development of the time, and had a population of over a million, the largest in its time.[2] The great scholars of the House of Wisdom included Al-Khawarizmi, the “father” of algebra, which takes its name from his book Kitab al-Jabr.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_wisdom
What’s more surprising, if I’ve deduced correctly, the author of the site is Turkish. That a Turkish designer would be so enchanted by Western modernist myths of progress and their framing of the “dark ages” (not to mention the presumed level of importance of monastic scholars for the preservation of what we’ve deemed as precious knowledge) is a great example of how thoroughly these myths have taken hold. History of the victors, I suppose.