click -> to continue as needed
In the introductory video clip,
you saw--work with me here, OK?--
"the real" behind all symbolizing:
the trees waving in the wind overhead.

And then there was a subject,
looking up into the trees,
feeling the texture of bark,
examining a pine cone;
a flaneur, strolling toward
a suburban, situated house.

He stops to look at the trees,
climbs steps made of trees,
past a woodpile made of trees,
to open a book made of trees,
and so to read about trees.

"Long-leaf pine trees," he says to himself,
and lo, interiority is born
(a reading from St. McLuhan).

Our interiorized subject now
shambles down the hall
to another Interface
where the Datacloud has resolved itself
into the image of a man among trees.
As you see here.
Mid-Industrial Revolution Man,
perhaps foreseeing the decimation
of the old-growth forests.

Let's move on. ->
Do you hear that?

Of course you don't.
Print, as Father Ong tells us,
removes sound from communication.

But it also disembodies the speaker,
and leads to a domination by
the visual.

Descartes' splitting of mind and body,
and the rise of empirical science,
allowed us to pretend that what is seen
is what's real.

Here, we see meanings being fixed.



->
And here begins
the indexing
categorizing
labeling
sorting
ordering
regimenting
disciplining
of the pine tree.

->
Print enables a priesthood.
the reproduceability of print mirrors the industrialization of modernity
and reinforces a centralized,






filter-then-publish paradigm.
pining: a circulation
and reconstruction
of nature
"Pine" is now
a commodity.

As language and print
permit the extraction of
essence and mind
from embodied experience,
"pineness" becomes
something you can bottle.

And, of course, sell.
Language distances us
from the 
effects of
cultural practices,
even when it serves
to inform us about
what's going on.
Print itself eats pine (and other) trees. 

Paper mills pollute the air, ground, and water.
"Pine" is further abstracted,
such that even when it seems to
exist in the embodied world,
it's just a simulacrum.
But the drive to embody experience remains strong.
Pine cones and needles retain a visual,
nonverbal meaning that resists print.
and In the manner of oral cultures,
we imbue ourselves with the essence of natural things.
We know the trees are still out there, in real places.
We each have our own embodied experience of the forest.
But we could not, until recently, easily share our paths.
Janisse Ray's talent notwithstanding, 
the sounds of the pine forest are but remotely accessible in print and absent from images.
(By the way, you've already heard a Pine Tree Blues in the introductory video segment, 
and you'll hear a fragment of poetry in the closing.)
Depictions of pines
often just
served the ends 
of the naturalist, the
scientific community,
industry.

You and I might sketch
a few trees,
but
who would see them?
this was
Maps can tell us things in ways we can't otherwise easily communicate; they sidestep the verbal and bring in the rich emotional language of color.

In maps we fly high above the terrain, godlike,
remote.
Maps reproduce political structures with the seeming inevitability of topography and geology.

They omit.

And, in this case, they only tell what was:
A long-gone fire-molded savannah,
Desoto's "deserts," now usurped by slash and strip.
Ultimately, we know that maps often emerge from data
rather than terrain.

We have a hyperabundance of data, geysers of information,
but is it knowledge? Is it phronesis?
The Web
sometimes
seems to have only
made our
rows and columns
more widely accessible.
For a long time,
it seemed that
the culture of printing
would remain ascendant.

Hypermedia 
still have paths,
after all.

Even
on the Brave New Web,
images can't escape
the interpretation
of words.
The read/write Web
brings with it
new freedoms:
Shirky's Everybody
can publish now.

Some foresee
a horror
of uncontrolled
vocabularies.

And it's still flat as a
pancake; a Life on the Screen.
The two-dimensional depictions
of The Flat Web
can seem frustratingly
constraining.
How might things change if space became a regular component of our texts?

What happens when, as Johnson-Eilola
put it in Datacloud, people become part of the information by injecting themselves into the display?

Will the hegemonic industrial and consumerist models be altered at all?

Will our experience of The Real be more directly evoked, or more completely buried under representation and construction?

Will we still see mainly with our eyes?

This journey concludes with an attempt to inject you into the datastream, if only a little. Read what you're about to see and hear. Where are we headed next?

(Actually, the journey never really concludes. It just recirculates, as you'll see.)

->
Pining