The message carried no importance. While the original paragraph was constructed to fit a certain space and followed the theme of cutting and pasting in an electronic document, the words could be any amalgamation. This is one method to approach Marshal McLuhan’s seminal message that “the medium is the message.” In other words, and to invert the claim, the content is not the message. What is written down matters less than the methodology or technology of creation. In this case, I began with Microsoft Word and printer paper. Scissors broke up the lines into phrases, and later the phrases into words. If “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (McLuhan 10), then the digital file is already print, which is already writing, which is already words, which are already letters, which are already sounds. Splicing the document up into shards follows this downward destruction and disintegration. What we are left with is something more visceral than the original document for it calls back to the roots of the communication system. The final document embodies the levels of content already in the medium and displays them in a way unachievable by the original medium. In an attempt to break out of the confines and illusions of the document screen, I hope to at least call attention to the “prisons without walls” constructed by “[s]ubliminal and docile acceptance of media impact” on “their human users” (McLuhan 28). Successful in this endeavor or not, Signs of Bleeding hopes to reveal the theoretical process of the ubiquitous “cut & paste” function to which we have all grown so accustomed.
One reason the process of cut and paste in a text document loaded on a computer screen may be seen as this unperceivable prison is that the programming operates behind the scenes. The program subsumes the user under a veil of dominance and control. We trust it and rely on it to perform our request without peeking behind the curtain. The human user feels secure in this relationship because of the language and iconography of its representation. The scissor and the glue, retrospectively, symbolize physical acts in a virtual space. They instill a sense of nostalgia in the user, harkening back to childhood activities that required such materials. Rarely does the user of the word processor get to physically interact with these tools that in real life are methods of creation and destruction. Instead we are given icons of these tools programmed into the word processor to remind us of these associations. While I appreciate that the first Oxford English Dictionary definition of “icon, n.” lists “‘cut’” as a definitive word, in computing the term arose in 1982 to mean “A small symbolic picture of a physical object on a computer screen, esp. one that represents a particular option and can be selected to exercise that option.” According to the OED the first usage of icon in regards to computers occurs in Computerworld whereby the star icon on the screen was intended be “equivalent to the familiar physical object in an office.” This can be said of the scissors icon for the cut function as well.
Computers in general and word processors specifically rely upon the keyboard which itself relied upon a phonetic alphabet. McLuhan argues that “[o]nly the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience” (96), distancing the literate subject from the experience words are meant to convey. “As an intensification and extension of the visual function,” McLuhan continues, “the phonetic alphabet diminishes the role of the other senses of sound and touch and taste in any literate culture” (McLuhan 96–7). The computer processor intensifies this distinction, drawing the user ever further away from other sensory experiences. The iconography, however, disrupts this construction. The icon recalls pictographic forms of representation which more directly connect semantically rich visuals with the signified. Such iconography attempts to introduce the “imaginative, emotional, and sense life” (McLuhan 100) to the user interactions with the computer. These particular items, though, distract the user from one form of mystification with another. The user may connect back to the icon and therefore the more direct referent, but only as the programming works behind the illusion of the screen. What occurs when the user executes the cut and paste of the program does not mirror onto the physical referent. What would seem more appropriate would be the disappearance and the prestige, bringing back what was threatened as lost. It’s a magical experience more than a tangible one.
This project attempts to bring the physical back into play in the cut and paste operation. To conduct these tasks with my own hands closed the gap between the referent and the icon. The physicality of the procedure felt visceral and embodied. During this process the page, which before felt cold and distant, began to feel more real, more animated. Cutting felt violent and destructive, as though the page may lay before me bleeding without any screen to hide behind.
To see the process of this project, reference the prior posts Cut and Paste, Scissors and Glue. Or Tape, When Words Bleed, and Photo or Scan.
The Process is the Project 
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