1The development of our theme for this issue of M/C was guided in part by our respective interests in 'texts' as both literary artifacts and formally designed entities. That said, in the usual spirit of M/C, the issue's ultimate editorial direction was cemented based on the range of submissions we received and selected. It is a particular challenge to distill key elements of an ongoing research project into an informative and credible textual package of just 1500 words. That said, we're delighted to present eight original short essays, along with an extended feature article; between them they cover a variety of 'textual' media such as graffiti, visiting cards, experimental film, and money. They also present a degree of breadth in the manner of their subjects' textuality. This includes: handwriting; printing (of ink on paper and the chemical processing of celluloid); typing in/to cyberspace; and engraving into metal and plastic.
2This issue’s feature article, Esther Milne’s “Magic Bits of Paste-board: Texting in the Nineteenth Century”, explores the notion of telepresence—substitution of the text for the corporeal body—through a consideration of nineteenth-century visiting cards, those “complex cultural avatars” that “conveyed the desires of class and gender in the construction of identity”. Through her discussion of the “complex language system” represented by the visiting card, Milne argues for an understanding of telepresence that extends beyond modern electronic media.
3In contrast to Milne’s analysis of visiting cards as nineteenth-century text messages is Gerard Goggin’s “mobile text”, a genealogy of the spectacularly successful short text messaging on mobile phones. Emphasising the fact that the popularity of SMS derives from its use by consumers, not its development by phone companies, Goggin explores the origins of SMS, the associated “elision, great compression, and open-endedness” of the short text messages, and the increasing commodification of the process of texting. This is an engagement with the textual artifact at the centre of “open-source, open-architecture, publicly usable nodes of connection”.
4Exploring in part a similar notion to that raised in Milne’s concluding analysis of the carte-de-visite, Sheryl Brahnam’s “Type/Face: The Missing Face of Writing” considers the human face as a text, from Socrates’s notion that writing’s inferiority to speech lies in the former’s lack of a human face, through the post-Renaissance obsession with physiognomy, through the modern mass consumption of the human face on television and in print. All this, Brahnam argues, leads to the modern interest in virtual faces, specifically the self-modelling “smart faces”. The smart face is a text that not only invites reading, but constantly rewrites itself.
5"Reading in the Dark: Michael Snow’s So Is This" offers a thoroughly engaging exploration of a piece of work by the Canadian experimental filmmaker (and jazz musician) Michael Snow. In Jane Simon's short essay we learn that So Is This was created in part as a response to the censoring of one of his existing films, and to the political objections raised by the imagery in yet another Snow film. So Is This is entirely devoid of images; indeed, its special relevance to this issue of M/C is its sole reliance on typeset words, producing what Simon calls a "supervised reading" that is unavoidable and "frustrating—some words are held on the screen for nearly a minute, causing all kinds of bodily aches and irritations—and also very entertaining". For Simon, then, "a whole discussion about critical writing practices seems to vibrate within the humorous and ‘light’ text of So Is This. It could be read as a film on film criticism, or at least a response to the methods of film writing, but it is about a lot of other things as well."
6In Jordan Williams’s “The Stigmata or the Tattoo: Eternity and the National Museum of Australia”, the notion of text under consideration is both narrowed and expanded. Williams considers not only the Museum as a readable text, but also engages with the building’s association with the more specific textual artifact that is Arthur Stace’s “Eternity” script, tracing the evocation of this text both inside and outside the building in terms of theories of tattoo versus stigmata.
7The fictional piece for this issue is Janet Jones’s “Interactive Essay Simulation”, in which dreams and reality, handwriting and electronic text, fuse to form a coherent but nightmarish textual world in which “the real world threatens back at gigabyte speed with Search Engine headlines proclaiming WAR, DISEASE, FAMINE, TERROR and AIDS”.
8In a piece that shares some of the same concerns as our feature article, Donna Lee Brien provides some fascinating insights into the nuanced process of "ventriloquizing": the invention of a pseudo-autobiographical account of certain aspects of an Australian woman's life using extensive archival research as a point of departure. "Imagining Mary Dean: Representing Another’s Life in Text" discusses the literary and ethical implications of this act, and Brien's attempts to develop a suitably authentic voice. This is made all the more compelling given the harrowing circumstances of Dean's early life in nineteenth-century Sydney, Australia, and the questions that remain about her ultimate fate.
9In “'Aren’t You Cool, You can Scribble Illegibly on Toilet Walls': Some Reflections on Graffiti in the Academy", Toby Ganley parses the representational codes of two pieces of related graffiti he once encountered in a university washroom. The first he identifies as a distinctive signature or ‘tag'; the second, reproduced in the title of his paper, is a entirely legible response to the tag. For Ganley, then, the result is a public dialogue of sorts that brings into question the intentionality of the graffiti's authors, and "exposes the gap between representation and the represented".
10"'Show Me the Money!': The Ideological Evolution of Monetary Form" explores the physical manifestations of currency - from silver to copper, paper and, ultimately, to plastic. In this paper, Sergio Rizzo discusses the graphical ephemera - symbols, mottos, even holograms - that adorn money in all its forms, in order to trace some of its semantic contours. As he says: "the different materials and their specific textual forms become the dominant, if not always preferred, means of transferring and storing value or wealth in their respective capitalist phases".
11Finally, we present an article that engages with a less fluid notion of “text” and its social significance. Simone Pettigrew's contribution is an informed, highly pragmatic discussion regarding the physical appearance and legibility of the printed word. In "Creating Text for Older Audiences" she argues that "the physical changes associated with aging have significant implications for the design and presentation of text". Scientific evidence points to the necessity for certain design features that can anticipate the inevitable changes in physiology and cognitive capacity that accompany aging.
