Semantic Space

Drawing terminology is, as Emma Dexter (Dexter, 2005, p.006) points out, "sewn into the wrap and weft of our lives" it is everywhere and yet it is nowhere. A drawing-specific term can describe with a certain degree of specificity some aspect of the discipline of drawing, whether it is a technique (“pencil” “silverpoint”, “chalk”), a kind of mark you leave on the paper (“line”, "stippling", "hatching" "cross-hatching"); an instrument that is used in drawing (“grid,” “stylus”, “pencil”, “rubber") or a type of drawing (“floor plan”, “elevation”, “under drawing”, “master drawing”, “sketch”, “study”) or it can be a term from another field, used analogically. Consequently, a term that can be applied to a discussion of drawing can be abstract, pivotal and open-ended and not necessarily a technical term or a term coming from the field of the arts, being applicable directly or by analogy to a discussion of drawing.

Visually, a confusing aspect of drawing is that it is constantly rising and sinking below the horizon of our perception, mutating and morphing from one visual role to another. In his discussion of the nature of information at the turn of the XX Century, Albert Borgmann (Borgmann, 1999) describes a similar phenomenon with respect to information, using the example of Native American cartography to point out that just like in such cartographic practices, in everyday reality, meaning seems to emerge and recede into the flow of things, the background of our awareness. In the example, the traveler identifies meaningful landmarks along the way and carries the map in his mind.

This map renders significant key elements of the landscape, a rock, a river bend, a mountain or a tree in connection to the traveler’s planned trajectory or route. It is our memory that holds the entire map, the traveler who passes recognizes the landmarks as indicative of a direction to be taken or as a marker of distance traveled. The information is acknowledged, after which the elements of physical reality recede into the background mental “landscape” once more. In drawing as I mention earlier, the problem is not having words to describe the landmarks and therefore the journey (of our gaze) goes largely unrecorded to the advantage of our final perception and recollection.

In drawing, the ambiguous relationship between foreground (drawn form) and background (paper, context) can also determine our "reading" of the image. Dexter (Dexter, 2005) cites Norman Bryson as saying that in a drawing, the white background acts as a reserve, a blank space from which the figure emerges, a space which he called "perceptually present, but conceptually absent" (Bryson, 2003) and one that serves to "keep at bay the desire for obvious structure, composition and totality"(ibid.) which he associates with other mediums such as painting.

The ambiguity of this relationship with negative space keeps us on our toes, never allowing the image to “settle down” as this or that, the coming and going of our gaze from foreground to background, which occurs in time, provides a sense of continuing journey, a trajectory that leaves behind residues that enrich and feed into our experience of the drawing, adding depth and opening up further spaces for interpretation.

When Bryson calls “a blank space from which space emerges” he is of course referring to the white of the blank sheet of paper as opposed to the sign that is the drawn image, but I propose here that that white sheet of paper, that blank piece of paper is in fact the perfect mirror, a mirror of our mind and because of this, a mirror of our perception of reality a perception that is paradoxically full and empty. It is full because there are things out there, but it is empty inasmuch as 99% of what there is makes no sense and is of no interest to us because we are not generally aware of such things. Consequently our perception of such things is very limited.

By viewing fullness and emptiness as opposing forces, Bryson also touches upon the idea of “horror vacui,” the fear of emptiness, assigning the white sheet of paper a vigilant role in controlling our desire to cover everything with signs, comparing drawing in its traditional view as “unfinished” as opposed to painting and other mediums.

The idea underlying this project is that our perception of reality is a one-to-one real time, changing perception where blank space and the drawn line are not alternative views as suggested by but simply datum to be considered in the context of the flow of reality and the journey of our gaze over such flow. In linguistic terms, the blank space is not a different sentence, but the space between words in that sentence, but what kind of space is this?

The introduction to Archispeak mentions the fact that the terminology used by the practitioners of any given discipline may seem at times obscure and perplexing to others, and often incomprehensible, added to the fact that architects, for example, enjoy engaging and articulating such terminology and often modify and adapt their meanings, occasionally inventing words at a very local and specific level. From a terminological point of view, therefore, it is necessary to pay particular attention to how widespread or local is the use of any given term in a broader context where the local is increasingly replaced by the global and where disciplinary boundaries provide an element of recognizable form.

Any discipline-specific language is a work in progress that is in constant evolution, a factor that also plays against the book format of traditional dictionaries. In the case of Archispeak, with collaborators that included Foster and Partners, Alsop Architects, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Gehry Partners and institutions such as RIBA in London and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States, the declared purpose was: "[to] respond to the need to translate architectural design concepts into spoken and written commentary—each word in use embodying a precise and universally accepted architectural meaning. If we explore the vocabulary of this language we gain insight to good design practice and to a collaborative understanding of what constitutes a refined architecture."(Porter et al, 2004).

In the fine arts, so far there has been no collective experience in the definition of medium-specific terminology, perhaps because notions of individual authorship still prevail and also possibly because artists’ collectives and partnerships are still rare enough to be considered the exception rather than the rule. Having said this, one would have to consider the impact on drawing and other mediums of the recent trend in research-based Ph.D. programs in postgraduate art education given that the expected outcome of such programs is to produce "communicable information" and that therefore the academic model of these programs is bound to produce a form of art that is "explainable" in a given theoretical context and therefore would incorporate the terminology for its discussion and explanation. Without completely ruling them out, this kind of work would tend towards the elimination of the random occurrences that are characteristic in the fine arts as well as any non-systemic flashes of inspiration.

A preliminary search through Archispeak, The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture and the Penguin Reference Dictionary of Architecture reveals the different focus of the various sources revised. The Penguin Reference Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, for example, yielded a total of 31 terms that could be associated with the medium of drawing. This dictionary has over 3,000 entries in total covering primarily a survey of architecture by country, biographies of architects, ancient and modern as well as structural and technical aspects and innovations. In this sense, the author’s desire for breadth, historical and cultural comprehensiveness conspired against its content of discipline-specific terminology in a theoretical sense.

The heading for the introduction of the Archispeak dictionary states "the 330 most used terms in architectural debate" (Porter, 2004, P.1); of these 109, were initially selected as terms that might be used in a discussion of drawing or which could contribute to such discussion. My search of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture identified 147 terms usable in a theoretical discussion of drawing or of any other aspect of reality as drawing. The Penguin Dictionary is closer to a pocket encyclopedia as its contents are not necessarily focused on the word, its origin, pronunciation and meaning, providing instead narrative and contextual descriptions, as well as having a sizeable number of biographical entries. Archispeak on the other hand, is based on usage and provides a complete list of contributors and their backgrounds. Metapolis, finally is what you might define as an ideological dictionary and has incorporated into its structure an ideological dictionary-within-a-dictionary. Of the three sources cited, this is formally the most interesting. With a total of 688 pages, it incorporates two independent sections within the dictionary: an ideological dictionary and also a list of aphorisms.

Manuel Gausa explains the structure of the Metapolis Dictionary in the following terms: “If, in fact the emergence of the new is almost invariably a cause of uncertainty (precisely because we do not know how to label it, and thus the difficulty of isolating the signs that are its expression and identifying the relationship of those signs with the existing ones) this necessary conceptual reactivation (and redefinition) of language is indispensable for a prospective action that does not stop at establishing a collection of fixed (and all encompassing) labels. This dictionary is aimed at constructing a hypothetical “basic” web (a matrix of terms, a mesh of codes) open to crossing and combination: aimed at favoring, in the last instance, the acknowledgement of that other network of forces and mechanisms that, in turn, comprises contemporary reality today.” (Gausa, et al. 2003).

This “basic” web or matrix of terms, the “mesh of codes” to which Gausa refers, is at the core of the method proposed here. On the one hand it reveals the vision of the authors of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture and at the same time it reveals its shortcomings, which, I believe, have to do primarily with the fact that, at the end of the day, its physical form and structure anchors the project in the past. The optimum expression of their vision is not the Dictionary but the Dictionary in use, the one-to-one moment one uses it. This project is an attempt to illustrate how this might happen.