One of the ironies that we live with is the insistent wordiness of computers and their culture. Even a casual listener to McLuhan a couple of decades ago could only conclude that the world was about to enter a largely imagistic world. Goodbye, books! Goodbye, linear thinking and writing! But, no. The Internet, at least in its present perhaps primitive manifestation, plunges us daily, hourly, into a medium that is more intensely verbal than any medium before it. How is it more intensely verbal? Two ways: 1. Think about how many layers of words you navigated through to get to this page. And 2. The medium is interactive. Mice are nice, but the old alphanumeric keyboard is where your hands spend most of their time. So in each issue of Magellan's Log, we offer a brief respite from words, a graphic holiday, a picture picnic. This time out, we have metallic renderings by one of our staffers, Kai Sonderling, who masterfully operates our graphic tablet. Since 1992 he's done a sequence of large pieces which he calls his "Chrome Series." We have reproductions of ten of them for you, with a bit of updated 400-year-old music thrown in at no extra charge. Chrome 01. Back to Magellan's Log 11 |