Who’s afraid of integrationist signs? Writing, digital art, interactivity and integrationism

Abstract

The author describes the seminal influence that Roy Harris has had on the creation of her interactive digital artworks about writing. Broadly speaking, Harris’s integrationist theory of writing separates writing from speech and (re)aligns it with spatial configurations. This approach offered robust solutions to the author’s creative struggle. The resulting artworks express Harris’s theory in a manner that is impossible with written words on paper, such as the idea that no fixed boundary can be erected between language and the non-linguistic. The artworks also require Harris’s theory in order to explain the new kinds of signs that are created by human-computer interaction with the works, such as dynamic, reflexive and multidimensional written Arabic signs that show in writing, but not in words, how the user is to read them. A brief discussion of the challenges of integrationist theory for non-linguists concludes the paper.