Summary:
Remembrance of Media Past engages with cultural archetypes as motivations for designing interfaces in contemporary media. I chose to take illuminated manuscripts as a central focus of my research because they were perhaps the most significant medium of complex information structures before the introduction of the mechanical reproduction beginning with the Gutenberg era. In its final articulation, the project components attempt to link these antecedent cultural interfaces to more current approaches to complex information structures.

Description:
Although the concept of interface is generally used with an assumption that it is only definable between a human and a machine, its history spans from much earlier periods as an elementary component in humans’ interaction with visual and textual media. In addition to that limited conception of interface today, the popular perception of the new media aesthetics primarily depends on the assumption that the older media’s visual conventions are remote practices with no implications on the new one, thus their visual paradigms are not applicable when the medium is “digital”. This is an obvious conflict primarily with the nature of the interactive digital media itself, since its one of the main features is allowing multi layered reading opportunities by re-mapping old media onto the new one.

Remembrance of Media Past engages with cultural media archetypes as motivations for designing interfaces in contemporary media. I chose to take illuminated manuscripts as a central focus of my research because they were perhaps the most significant medium of complex information structures before the introduction of the mechanical reproduction beginning with the Gutenberg era. In its final articulation, the project components attempt to link these antecedent cultural interfaces to more current approaches to complex information structures.

Examples:
1. The Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices

Kitab-al Hiyal (The Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) documents the mechanical description of various hydraulic machines, written in 1206 by Al Jazari, an irrigation engineer who was employed in the palace of the Artuklu Sultanate in today’s southeastern Turkey. The book contains approximately 300 automated devices including their construction and usage information — all illustrated with technical drawings in the style of miniature painting.
One of the most important aspects of this book is its visualization techniques such as showing the important parts of mechanisms separately in a bigger scale, constructing mechanisms step-by-step from parts to whole, and cross sectioning for depicting inner layers. Another characteristic of this manuscript as an interface archetype is the attention given not only to the explained mechanisms with their functional structure but also to the outer layer that creates and enhances the illusion of artificial life. The fairytale figures on the outermost layers of the mechanisms can better be understood and appreciated as they represent yet another aim of their overall visual design that is the entertainment of the guests of Artuklu Palace.

2. Surname

Surname is a literary style that describes the celebrations in wedding, birth and circumcision ceremonies in Ottoman Palace. This book is a miniature manuscript based on one of these Surnames. In the Surname (1582-1583) of Murat III, Nakkas (the painter) Osman built a documentary of the 55-day long festival organized for the honor of the Shehzadehs (Sultan’s sons.) Although the scene of the festival was represented in a fixed background, the parts of the “décor” were enriched by surprising variations with no particular aim to depict a real space. Therefore, the structural aspects of this manuscript reflect the characteristics of a subjective narration as opposed to a documentary that is claiming to be objective. However this is still not an individual subjectivity but a collective subjectivity that represents the visual attitude formed by the visual culture of the era.
In this project, cinematography was used as a tool of navigation within the miniature environment. The whole scene was divided into layers considering the iconographic narration of the miniatures. A virtual camera travels within the 3D layered space, occasionally focusing on the sub narratives of the celebration. In these sub narratives, a user/viewer can examine the points of view of figures through cinematic visual grammar.

Research Context:
This project emerged from conceptual issues that I encountered in teaching interface design in Istanbul. The main premise of this research and design project is based on a distinct approach to the term “interface”. I consider “interface” in terms of the historical evolution of knowledge production/dissemination media as they traverse cultural sites.

Evaluation of Opportunities/Limitations for the Transliteracies Topic:
The project is by nature, highly interdisciplinary and collaborative. Choosing manuscripts as cultural interfaces and specifically focusing on the ones that include complex information structures such as maps, miniatures (paintings) and medieval technical books diagramming mechanical devices, requires collaboration with new media scholars, historians of science, philologists, and scholars of visual culture. In this study I explore theoretical grounds for establishing a methodology to apply this perspective in a systemic way. Therefore, I consider integrating academic resources from the “media pedagogy”, “culture and cognition” and “sociology of science” fields for further studies. Possible application areas of this study can be in culturally responsive learning environments, collaborative knowledge production in multicultural research networks and in the analysis of cultural aspects of interaction modes in new media.

Next Stages:
I am currently focusing on the analysis of the selected visual elements in these two works in order for a comprehensive understanding of the concepts of time and space as they were imagined and represented at their respective times of production. By applying the cognitive science analysis frameworks such as conceptual blending and distributed cognition I am planning to study the cultural origins of the cognitive aspects of time and space concepts in relation to the particular symbolic systems referred by these visual elements.

Resources for Further Study:

• Jazari’s Ablution Automata


• Jazari’s Elephant Clock