purple motes

The Alexander Mosaic, as well as other later artistic and experimental evidence, shows that the visual conventions of writing affect art.  The Alexander Mosaic was found in a house buried in Pompeii in 79 GC when Mount Vesuvius erupted.   The mosaic is probably a copy of a painting that Philoxenos of Eretria made about 310 BGC.  It shows Alexander the Great, wearing on his breast an image of Medusa, leading his army in a rout of the army of Darius III of Persia.  The mosaic's macro structure is linear, like written text.  Moreover, the action depicted moves from left to right, like the typical direction of Hellenistic Greek text.

The Warka Vase provides an even earlier example of writing's influence on art.  The vase was made in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk about 3,200-3,000 BGC.  Hence it was created at the same time and place in which writing developed in Mesopotamia.  The vase has in carved relief five horizontal registers.  The lowest register represents water.  The next higher register has a regular pattern of barley and palm plants.  Then comes a register of alternating rams and ewes facing right.  Above that is a register of nude men carrying baskets of goods to the left.  The top register shows the male ruler, proceeded by another nude male carrying a basket of goods, moving to the right to meet a female figure.   The female figure is associated with the goddess Inanna.  The ancient Mesopotamian text Inanna and Enki declares, "her genitals were remarkable. ...... her genitals were remarkable.  She praised herself, full of delight at her genitals." Scholars thus interpret the Warka Vase as representing and explaining the sex-based distribution of goods in both ancient and modern societies.

The Warka Vase's composition shares many features with early Mesopotamian writing (images of vase).  Early Mesopotamian writing consisted of impressed tablets used to account for goods.  The Warka Vase was closely associated with examples of such tablets within the stratum and location in which it was recovered in Uruk.  Among the common compositional features of the vase and impressed tablets:

• parallel horizontal registers of figures
• figural hierarchy, with the most important/largest figures in the top-most register
• on a single line, more important/larger figure placed to the right of less important/smaller figure
• larger figural size indicates greater importance/greater magnitude
• boustrophedon (alternating directions) of the figural line

The Warka Vase shows images created to be read using the same compositional understandings that organized proto-writing.  Before the development of writing, art does not show this kind of literal composition.  The common sensory ecology of art and letters within the human body is echoed in artifacts.

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Note:  The above analysis of the compositional relation between the Warka Vase and impressed tablets is based on Schmandt-Besserat, Denise (2007) When writing met art: from symbol to story (Austin: University of Texas Press) pp. 41-6.  That source also shows that art before the development of writing did not have a literal composition.

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Modern bureaucratic art is unjustly deprived of the spotlight it deserves in leading museums and galleries in Washington, D.C. The Hirshhorn's museum's ongoing exhibition, The Panza Collection, leads the way with a needed expansion of artistic appreciation. One work exhibited is Lawrence Weiner's REDUCED. The exhibition documentation explains:

Lawrence Weiner gained international recognition in the late 1960s when he began using text as his primary means of expression.

Bureaucrats have been using text as their primary means of expression since the invention of text in ancient Mesopotamia about 5000 years ago.

The modern artist who best exemplifies bureaucratic art unquestionably is Hanne Darboven. The Panza Collection includes her work 27K-No8-No26 (excerpt shown above). Technically, it consists of 149 pages of written numbers and some text. It has the feel of an accountant's working papers, but is somewhat more tightly structured. The work brilliantly captures the process of making and editing documents. Best of all, it represents the astonishing volume of work that dedicated bureaucrats produce.

Surprisingly, Darboven received highly academic training at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, but apparently has no significant on-the-job experience in a major bureaucracy. Yet, as a great artist, Darboven seems to have intuited the essence of the bureaucratic form. An art critic insightfully observed:

Over time, time has become the focus of Darboven's art. ... The calendar, which subsequently formed the foundation of Darboven's art practice, again offered a universal orientation, embodying a given, prefabricated, ready-made temporal system. Calibrated in her work in many ways over almost three decades, it has provided the basis of an arbitrary artistic system that has the appearance of objectivity. Conjoining a rigorous numerical process with free-associative roots, and tight rational thought with intellectual freedom, Darboven's capricious sense of time has resulted in diverse monumental works that may span a month, a year, even a century, all recorded day by day.

A focus on time, recorded day by day, is central to bureaucratic art. On any given day, leading artists can tell you how many more days remain before they can retire.

Will Willkinson at Fly Bottle considers Technocracy vs. Liberal Democracy. He reasons:

So bureaucrats in a technocracy will be motivated to explore ideas, while bureaucrats in a democracy will be motivated to signal and recruit fidelity to the coalition’s pre-assigned ideas.

Will needs to ponder 27K-No8-No26. Bureaucrats in all types of organizations and political systems mark time.

Leo Babauta at zenhabits offers 10 Steps to Take Action and Eliminate Bureaucracy. But if you eliminate bureaucracy, there will be no one to study what action to take. Taking action without reason is unenlightened.

Scott Erb at World in Motion recognizes the importance of bureaucrats. The success or failure of any government depends on bureaucrats.

Marco's Webdev Notepad considers the relationship between bureaucracy and agile software development. He declares that "bureaucracy is seen as inhibitor to software process improvement efforts and particularly to agile methodologies" and that a "cultural shift towards agile will make many ‘bureaucrats’ uncomfortable." That's absurd. As Moe convincingly shows, bureaucrats are extremely agile.

SengAun Ong at Tipskey submits Work Email Tips and remarks, "Bureaucrats at work like me can be efficient in email writing too!" Handling email more efficiently means that you can produce more documents in a given amount of time. Highly recommended.

Jay Wilkinson, writing on the blog of the Montclair State University sociology department, describes the Department of Motor Vehicles at the "epitome of bureaucracy." Most DMV's are outstanding bureaucracies. Nonetheless, only 20-30 localities have Top-10 bureaucracies.

That's all for this month's Carnival of Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival's regulations. Past editions of the Carnival of Bureaucrats can be found on the Carnival's category page.

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Douglas - that's Scottish
for a bog man who did just
half a day's digging.

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Writing is much more socially complex than making art and making music.  Art and music draw on natural forms and make sense at a low level of neurological processing.  A single person could invent a form of visual art or music that might be engaging to many others without a specific investment in teaching them. Inventing writing, in contrast, requires teaching a group of persons a common code for meaning-making.[1]

At least in Mesopotamia, the emergence of writing seems to be associated with accounting for goods.  Large-scale farming and industry, stratified societies, systematized economic tributes, and relatively high-density, geographically fixed population centers all developed together.  The general model is producers who are able to produce enough extra goods to pay tribute to the ruler and his associated administrative and military apparatus that forms the nucleus of a population center.  Systematized economic tribute requires accounting.   The first writing in Mesopotamia arose from this accounting.[2]

A key innovation was the use of small, clay tokens.  A specific type of token represented a particular amount of a particular good.  For example, a spherical token might represent a small basket of barley, and three such tokens, three small baskets of barley.  Such tokens could be used to record goods collected or delivered.  The tokens thus provided a physical tool for thinking about quantities of objects.  Many such tokens have been recovered from Mesopotamian sites dating from 10000 to 5000 years before the present.

Tokens led to impressed and incised signs.  First, tokens associated with a particular person were kept in clay envelopes on which the person's seal was impressed.  To indicate the tokens that were sealed in the envelope, the tokens placed within the envelope were also pressed against the outer surface of envelope.   Those marks thus indicated with a one-to-one, geometric correspondence the tokens within the envelope.  Over time, the envelopes became writing slabs.   The marks retained their meaning without the corresponding tokens being contained within the envelope/slab.  In addition, instead of impressing the marks using tokens, the marks were incised with a stylus.  Once the mental skill of reading written signs was well-developed and institutionalized, the physical tokens were no longer needed.

By about 5000 years ago, accounting signs had evolved into a general-purpose written language.  Signs related by physical quantities of goods (a large basket of barley vs. a small basket of barley) evolved into abstract numbers (the sign for the large basket came to mean, e.g., "ten times as much").   Pictographs were associated with the sounds of items pictured, and combinations of such pictographs were probably first used to indicate the sound of personal names.  Such pictographs provide more flexible and efficient attribution than personal seals.  Demand for funereal objects that could "speak" prayers for the dead through written phrases seems to have stimulated further development of syntax and sign repertoire.

The time scale of the development of writing suggests social network effects.  The use of tokens for accounting endured for about 5000 years.  Once such accounting had led to incised signs, a general written language developed within a span of about 500 years.  Incised signs could be created, copied, and circulated relatively cheaply.  Texts thus provided a new communication network.  That network in turn supported rapid social-symbolic innovation.

Notes:

[1] Humans have been making art and music much longer than they have been writing.   Artifacts testifying to prehistoric art include ochre engraved with abstract markings (more than 70,000 years before the present [BP]), the Chauvet cave paintings (probably about 30,000 BP), a lion-headed figurine (32,000 BP), and various female figurines (about 25,000 BP).  Prehistoric musical instruments include a bone pipe from Geissenklösterle in Germany (36,000 BP).   In contrast, the earliest writing occurred only about 5,500 years ago, with various evidence from China, Egypt, Uruk (Mesopotamia), and Harappa (Indus valley).

[2] My account of the development of writing is based on the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, as set out in her highly readable book, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).  The development of writing in China may have been driven more by political and familial-religious demands.

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YouTube now supports video captions.  Captions are uploaded as a separate text file.  YouTube also provides automatic translation of these captions into many languages.  Web tools for creating caption files are free and easy to use.  I recently used overstream to create captions for a docudrama some friends and I made.  Making captions takes time and is an art in itself, but technically it is now easy to do.

Even in its "advanced search" page, YouTube doesn't offer search limited to captioned videos.   Search limited to captioned videos would be an easy feature to implement, because the associated caption file readily indicates a captioned video.[1]  This search type would be helpful to deaf and hard-of-hearing persons.  Moreover, a person's use of it would provide valuable information for delivering useful ads to that person, e.g. social events and social networks for deaf and hard-of-hearing persons, hearing aids and accessories, etc.

YouTube has a lot of room to improve its revenue.  It could implement a premium-paid tier, which might offer videos longer than 10 minutes and better video quality.   Its search-choose model with Video ID has much potential.  YouTube has added video annotations, which users value and which over time will provide more information for targeting advertisements.  The APIs for its video platform will over time provide more information for targeting advertisements.  Despite all the hype about Hulu's revenue, I still think that worse content with higher-value advertising can beat better content with lower-value advertising.

Note:

[1] Videos with captions included within the video stream would be much harder to identify.  Unlike the "closed captions" discussed above, these "captured captions" can't be turned off and on, can't be automatically translated, and can't be searched as text.  The presence of videos with captured captions doesn't seem to me to be a good reason for not providing search limited to (closed) captions.

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A brief, coy, near-smile
from a supermarket check-out girl.
Does she know that I’m -- a poet?

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Real-time visual communication using a mobile phone doesn't seem to be happening.  Working with Kodak, Motorola announced early this month the Motozine ZN5.  It's relatively cheap mobile phone with a high-quality digital camera.  Sharing a photo with this device means uploading the photo to a website or emailing it.  So the Motozine ZN5 isn't a show-and-tell communicator.

Other developments suggest possibilities for innovation.  Pure Digital Technologies has trumped the large, established consumer electronics companies with its easy-to-use Flip Video camcorders.  Since the launch of Flip Video in May, 2007, more than 1.5 million of the camcorders have been sold.  The Flip Video Ultra is now the top-selling camcorder in the U.S. Perhaps a lesson: a real-time visual communicator will have to be easy to use, but a small, new company's easy-to-use device could be successful against a large variety of devices from traditional mobile phone providers.

Google recently announced voice and video chat conveniently integrated into Gmail.  Video chat from a desk-top computer provides much less interesting communicative context then video chat (or photo sharing) from a mobile device.   But possibilities for mobile devices will surely expand rapidly with the development of the Android platform.   So the innovation necessary to produce a successful real-time visual communicator will occur in an open field for device design.

Despite little evidence of it thus far, real-time visual communication still seems to me to be a propitious area for future communications industry growth.

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Ancient Mesopotamian legal codes had broad purposes.  For example, the Code of Hammurabi, written in the city of Babylon about 1760 BGC (about 3768 years ago), declares as its purposes:

to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; ... [to] enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind. ... Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. ... [I] brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. ... That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, .. in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words

The Code of Ur-Nammu, written in the city of Ur about three hundred years before the Code of Hammurabi, specifies in its preface:

Ur-Nammu ... in accordance with his principles of equity and truth ... [did] establish equity in the land; he banished malediction, violence and strife ... the orphan was not delivered up to the rich man; the widow was not delivered up to the mighty man; the man of one shekel was not delivered up to the man of one mina [sixty shekels].

The Code of Hammurabi, like other ancient Mesopotamian laws, represents the ruler as a father to his subjects.  Consistent with this idea, it and other ancient Mesopotamian laws recognize the vulnerability of widows and orphans, who are persons without male benefactors/protectors.[*]  Yet, in contrast to the position of the male ruler, whose power and riches the laws glorify,  the Code of Ur-Nammu specifically condemns a high-status ["one mina"] man exploiting a low-status ["one shekel"] man.  This concern for low-status men is less conceptually consistent,  more unusual, and less appreciated than the father-ruler's concern for widows and orphans.

An all-powerful king's concern for low-status men probably responds to the social obviousness of some men's extreme exploitation of other men in ancient Mesopotamia.  Ancient Mesopotamian social structure (and the law codes themselves) clearly distinguished classes of persons, including a numerous class of chattel slaves.  A free man could be made a slave as punishment for crime or debt.  One man making another man into a slave is an extreme form of exploitation.   Because exploitation of men was so extreme and so obvious, the all-powerful king declared implicitly that only he had authority to exploit other men.

Note:

[*] The epilogue to the Code of Hammurabi imagines and represents a subject figuring Hammurabi as a father: "Hammurabi is a ruler, who is as a father to his subjects, ... who has bestowed benefits for ever and ever on his subjects, and has established order in the land."

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