Rachel's Response

The image depicted is taken from an illustration included in a book, titled “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter” by German philosopher Friedrich Kittler. It is of a woman listening to dictation and then transcribing the words through a typewriter. The pointy object attached to her head is the horn of the speaker, which could resemble any sort of horn (bring on the unicorns). The look of illustration and faded colors is intentional, with the background done as handwork with screen filler, and several layers of halftone photo screenprint on top. I purposely distorted and printed over the first layers with dark colors to give the look of another era, and create a mysterious feeling, open to interpretation. One could say nostalgia, and yet one is not quite sure. The colors are warm, like a familiar old children’s book illustration, but the images on top are dark, shadowy, and unclear. Is this a positive or negative view of the past? What does this have to do with today? (These are questions I often ask myself and hope that the viewer asks them as well.)

I have typewritten the phrase: “Our writing tools are working on our thoughts” over the entire print. It is a quote from Nietzsche, one of the first philosophers to use the typewriter. He used the machine due to extremely poor eyesight and had chosen a very early European model that prevented anyone from seeing what they were writing while typing the words (it was, in fact, designed to be used by the blind, hence the ball shape to easily find the letters.) This was a miraculous invention, despite many technical difficulties, that gave some the ability to write again. Nietzsche himself did not use it much after becoming discouraged by its difficulty to use and maintain.



The direction of the type is vertical due to the page size. In a standard machine, it could only fit in lengthwise, so it is 8 ½ inches wide, which is the height dimension of the print. I thought that would be more obvious going in an opposing direction to the image. We are often confined and standardized by the machines and printers into which we input and output data every day without much of a second thought.

Do I expect the viewer to recognize that this has something to do with Nietzsche using an early typewriter for the blind, or even where the illustration is from or what might be sticking out of her head? No, not at all. I can only hope to stir a vague and general notion about the way in which we communicate, contrasting to how we used to communicate, and what changes, gains and losses have occurred in between. I would like all to think, just a little bit, about how we are constrained and manipulated by our writing tools. Are we all just typing blindly?