Mariusz Pisarski
The future of text, apart from all desired qualities that relate to its augmentation structures and mechanisms, needs to be above all future-proof. How can this be achieved when humanity – and the Earth itself – is facing existential threats of climate crisis, overpopulation, and dictators who write the text of the future with war and death? Can we rest assured that AR and VR enhancements of text, which in turn enhance our minds, will survive a massive power outage? We cannot. However, we can start designing our texts in ways that draw from the best surviving examples of the past, while baring in mind bold projections of the “deep” future of text.
Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart
So that your name might live on like theirs!
The scroll is better than the carved stone.
A man has died: his corpse is dust,
And his people have passed from the land.
It is a book which makes him remembered
In the mouth of the speaker who reads him.
This chant of an ancient scribe, found on an Egyptian papyrus from about 1300 BC, is astounding in its media-specific self-consciousness. The author was clearly aware of the impermanence of text, of the differing qualities of textual media (stone versus papyrus), and of the act of reading aloud as a performative reconstruction of the original voice. Perhaps they also suspected that a papyrus scroll, under the dry desert weather conditions that Upper Egypt enjoys to this day, could survive millennia – contrary to the same inscription technology used in the wetter climates of the Nile Delta or the Mediterranean. It is still surprising to see the scribe, who in the first verses is preoccupied with the longevity of their engravings and of their own name, ultimately deem stone inferior to scroll. Speed and ease of writing, portability, replicability – these qualities of papyrus scrolls made the scribe a techno optimist. Yet in the end, if they did not enjoy the “storage privilege” of the royals, it was rather pure luck that allowed these words to travel to the 21st century unharmed.
What about those scribes who were not so lucky? What could they have done to ensure their texts survived? Translation, multiplication and scalability – the three-thousand-year-old poem, and many other relics of ancient Egyptian literature, prove that such considerations were not alien to the early literati. For example, staying with – or returning to – the old medium of stone by translating a longer scroll into a handful of hieroglyphs that compress the main message onto a potentially longer-lasting material support. Or translating the text into cuneiform on a clay tablet of the type made famous by the 1400 BC Amarna Letters. A scribe’s text on a scroll, multiplied and amplified across different culturally recognised writing surfaces, becomes a postcard sent to us across time and space, stamped with an “engraving in their heart”, created in that particular moment. The full force of its epistemological impulse, its high-resolution semantics, is carried by the new medium of papyrus, but the supporting ontological life buoys are thrown toward the reader of the future in the form of old media objects such as clay tablets and stones. The latter, as the oldest medium, serve as de facto foundation stones of the song projected into the future of its text. The more translated, scaled and distributed, the better for the text. The relic that survives into the future becomes a dog tag of the text that once was.
In the 20th century we witnessed another scroll-versus-stone moment, when digital technologies remediated and augmented print. Previous volumes of the Future of Text series are the best representation of what writers, engineers and scholars – some of the sharpest minds at the current technological and cultural shift – envision for this field. Does the lesson I attempt to draw from ancient Egyptian scribal culture mean that we should begin writing on stone while interacting with text in digital and XR/VR environments? Our societies already write in stone, much like the Egyptians did: to commemorate a person, an institution, or a group of people in ways meant to outlast cataclysms – such as the accidental burning of the Library of Alexandria by Caesar or the destruction of the Krasiński Library in Warsaw by the Nazis. In fact, the contemporary equivalent of stone as a medium capable of travelling across centuries is the DNA code. Transgenic text experiments by Eduardo Kac or Christian Bök may outlast the human race and witness the very end of our planet. By encoding poems into the DNA of bacteria that can replicate ad infinitum and survive nuclear and climate disasters, these projects may indeed project an ultimate “deep future” of text. If anyone is there to read it…
What I would rather suggest is that when designing our future-proof texts today, we do so in the spirit of graceful remediation – where old media and the material supports of accompanying objects participate in the text as a constellation. Hybrid works of electronic literature that mix new media with old, page with screen, and power-hungry with unplugged inscription surfaces, stand out in our current collections as works that generate more engagement than monomedia. In the early years of digital entertainment, feelies – physical artefacts accompanying computer games – were common. For more than thirty years John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse has existed both as a hypertext fiction distributed on a 3.5-inch floppy disk and as a physical box containing materials that belong fully to the story. In both cases the tangible, analogue paraphernalia have outlived the digital technologies and platforms that supported the main text.
Our XR/VR texts of the future – our immediations and hypermediations – can learn from authors who created at those moments when the tectonic plates of old and new media collided. First, by designing representations of both hyper-real (in the traditional sense of enhancement and augmentation) and real dependencies, where digital objects are accompanied by physical counterparts, where the semantic realm merges with the sensorial, and where the epistemology of the text shakes hands with its ontology. Second, while designing a full, state-of-the-art experience for contemporary audiences, we must ensure there is a foundation stone (or a dog tag) for future readers. Such a message in a bottle, summarising – respectively – either the beginning or the end of the text’s life, may carry at least some part of us into the unknown. Whether such a message is placed in the digital or analogue domain is a matter of belief. Who knows – perhaps we all end up in what Marvin Minsky imagined as Mentopolis, where human brain structures survive their owners’ biological death in digital form. In that case, as dog tags of our past selves, powered by the light of distant stars, we may even witness the death of the Earth – and with it all book- or DNA-bound texts ever created on our planet.