I was very tempted to write my response in Wingdings font, but I figured that it would only be funny for a little bit and then it would be a pain for everyone to figure out exactly what I was saying—which seems to be the point of Ngai’s article on one level. Gimmick and comedy go hand-in-hand, as do gimmicks and labor. She notes that a gimmick is “both a wonder and a trick…a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain, whose affective intensity for us increases precisely because of this ambivalence” (469). Page 493 of Ngai’s article has a great list of the paradoxes that gimmicks possess (saves labor but intensifies labor, works too hard yet works too little, seems outdated though futuristic, etc.). Based upon this argument, is Book from the Ground a gimmick? Possibly. I think Russ’s post makes a strong point regarding this idea based upon the amount of cultural, digital, and technical knowledge required to make sense of certain icons found in the book. We get the initial impression that labor will be saved because we don’t actually have to read anything. However, if you were to consider all of the time spent accruing knowledge of “contemporary life” to get to the point where one is proficient enough to understand all of the icons in the book, there is no way that it is less labor intensive. Additionally, for me, it took much longer than I anticipated to read the book. Icons didn’t save me any labor on my weekly reading assignment.
Regarding the whole concept of a universal language that Russ points out, I’m really interested in the text’s relationship to music. After all, what is a piece of sheet music aside from an arranged collection of icons on a page that communicates an aural idea from one person to another in a universally applicable format? Just like writing or the iconography used in Book from the Ground, musical notation is a matter of translation, especially for those individuals trained in the discipline of sight singing who do not require an instrument to help formulate the correct notes. I know that there is a fundamental difference between words and music in what they can convey (though that is something we can discuss). Still, if we are talking about a universal icon system, we have one, and Xu Bing points to it by giving us several musical passages on the very first page (see the end of this post for links to each of these songs). By seeing this connection at the very outset, I got the impression that this text is not very different from something that we are used to (i.e. music); the alien aspect is that the iconographic representation is used to replace a different style of signification system.
Translating music from the written to the audible is a simpler process than translating icons or pictographs into their meanings because it requires less cultural knowledge. On page one, Xu Bing gives us the time signature, the key, the rhythm, and the notes of the bird’s song. The only thing he doesn’t give us is the tempo, so that is up to interpretation based upon real-life knowledge of bird songs. The only other point of confusion in translating the bird’s song is that there are little breaks at irregular points, sometimes at the end of a measure and sometimes right in the middle of one. In my “performance,” I interpreted them to be slight breaks in the song, though it is impossible to tell how long those breaks may be.
The most interesting part of this whole enterprise is the alarm clock’s jingle. Bing eliminates the grounding elements of musical notation—the staff, the key, the time signature—and only includes several eighth notes, a few sixteenth notes, and a quarter note.
Using the fact that the bird seems to duet with the alarm clock (which is corroborated in the translation at the end of Book about Book from the Ground), I made the inference that both tunes must be in the same key and took a guess at what pitches the notes might represent based upon the downward facing stems, their relative positions to each other, and the fact that I had definite notes for the harmony, meaning that the alarm clock’s melody shouldn’t clash with the bird’s accompaniment. The result of this little experiment produced something pretty cool. The alarm tone is not just a throwaway line of random notes, but a classical-sounding tune reminiscent, for me at least, of Vivaldi’s “Spring” (though it’s not that exact piece).
The elimination of more familiar, grounding elements along with a motion towards using contextual clues in this duet between bird and alarm clock provides readers a type of guide for the rest of the book’s project: some of the more traditional elements of reading/writing will be absent, leading to a less precise understanding of every aspect of the story, leaving room for interpretation and experimentation.
Yes, digital iconography replacing words is a foreign system to us, but Bing provides us a with the methodology for reading on the very first page using a more familiar universal translation system. Maybe, then, the book isn’t so much of a gimmick after all.
The Songs:
Note that for whatever reason, the songs don’t play for me when I open them on my phone. Everything works correctly when I use my laptop. Also, I’m pretty sure I transcribed everything accurately, but I may have made an error or two somewhere. My apologies to the bird if I did.
Initial bird (according to the translation at the end of Book about Book from the Ground): https://onlinesequencer.net/652824
Long bird passage: https://onlinesequencer.net/652823
Alarm: https://onlinesequencer.net/652334
Alarm/bird duet: https://onlinesequencer.net/652807
Bonus song I made up because I was having way too much fun with this instead of doing actual work: https://onlinesequencer.net/652400
