Quella cosa strana che fanno solo gli esseri umani - Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing

Quella cosa strana che fanno solo gli esseri umani 

In luoghi ed epoche diversi, per comunicare l’essere umano ha sempre sentito il bisogno di formalizzare la lingua parlata, ma alcune società non hanno mai avvertito questa esigenza.

In che modo la lettura dei simboli pittorici è diversa da quella delle lettere, che sono basate su simboli fonetici?

Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing

The Chinese artist Xu Bing has long experimented to stunning effect with the limits of the written form. Last year I visited the Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, to see a retrospective of his work. One installation, Book from the Sky, featured scrolls of paper looping down from the ceiling and lying along the floor of a large room, printed Chinese characters emerging into view as I moved closer to the reams of paper. But this was no ordinary Chinese text: Xu Bing had taken the form, even constituent parts, of real characters, to create around 4,000 entirely false versions. The result was a text which looked readable but had no meaning at all. As Xu Bing himself has noted, his made-up characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” in a sly sendup of our respect for the written word.

https://nautil.us/issue/94/evolving/reading-that-strange-and-uniquely-human-thing

Nota: l'articolo è pubblicato in italiano sulla rivista settimanale Internazionale n. 1395 del 5 febbraio 2021