Random
@MoMa
Paola Antonelli of MoMa has written an short post dedicated to celebrating MoMa’s ‘acquiring’ the @ symbol into the collection. I didn’t know much about the @ symbol, so I thought it was a pretty good read. Here’s a bit for you:
The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, [Ray] Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol.
“In Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.”
LRB
“In Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.”
LRB
alan, thanks for that link.
alan, thanks for that link.
Cool post, smart picture.
Cool post, smart picture.
only the true snobs amongst us will now call it the ‘arobase’.
only the true snobs amongst us will now call it the ‘arobase’.
The act of ‘acquiring’ a symbol feels like either a publicity stunt or a very pretentious ‘art act.’
This blog post was the 3rd place where I have read about this happening and it wasn’t until reading the link to the MoMa’s webpage that I could finally, definitively, say ‘Oh, they didn’t copyright or buy the intellectual property to anything.’
So what seems to be at play here is the definition of the word ‘acquire’ and some sort of uniqueness surrounding the one character ‘@’ out of so many other characters that are used in type:
I’m not really charmed by either of these.
I totally agree, Ryan, it seemed like a short post for them to explain something that truly needs more fleshing out.
The act of ‘acquiring’ a symbol feels like either a publicity stunt or a very pretentious ‘art act.’
This blog post was the 3rd place where I have read about this happening and it wasn’t until reading the link to the MoMa’s webpage that I could finally, definitively, say ‘Oh, they didn’t copyright or buy the intellectual property to anything.’
So what seems to be at play here is the definition of the word ‘acquire’ and some sort of uniqueness surrounding the one character ‘@’ out of so many other characters that are used in type:
I’m not really charmed by either of these.
I totally agree, Ryan, it seemed like a short post for them to explain something that truly needs more fleshing out.