viz.

I had no idea virtual book tours existed until someone contacted me to review Errol Morris's new book Believing Is Seeing in viz. Or, rather, as soon as someone contacted me to review Errol Morris's book, I was like "Of course they have virtual book tours. They have virtual everything." I just didn't realize "virtual book tour" was the Google phrase. A virtual book tour schedules reviews on blogs over time (in this case, about a month) to generate sustained buzz. You are here, at stop five on this tour. Welcome to this very special event. I start here to emphasize what we all already know (but what a colleague just reminded me of): temporality is different online. An idea moving across the country in a van is a tour. An idea moving across the internet is a meme. They are different things.

The Edison-Bell picturegram from 1927 (in Sound Recordings). The toy illustrates the convergence of sound and image.

As the budding audio recording industry was creating use value by advertising the phonograph alongside writing machines, pens, pencils, and cameras, another convergence was happening as well. The motion picture industry, which developed concurrently with the audio recording industry, sought to synch up the sights and sounds of the body. Talking, singing, dancing, fighting, and falling had been standard in the motion picture industry since it began, but these bodily acts happened silently on screen. It was only a matter of time before the body would be audible on screen.

Illustration of Edison's original phonograph from Scientific American in 1877.

Between the visual origins of the phonograph and a robust consumer market centered on record labels, there was a period of time during which the invention had to establish its own utility. According to Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, utility always comes after the act of invention:

The link between uselessness and invention even applies to instrumental reason: a true invention is an object that precedes its utility. An invention is something for which a use must be created. Once the utility is produced, it rapidly self-converts into a need. This is the direction of flow of the history of technology (of which bodies, things, and objects are the first artifacts): backward. (96)

Grooves from the original phonograph recording, reproduced in Scientific American in 1877.

Most of us do not process audio recordings in a vacuum. There is a visual dimension to our aural world. Although, sadly, liner notes are impoverished in the digital realm (although not absolutely or irrevocably so), we still have a world of visual information when navigating sound in digital spaces. Whether digital or analog, sights and sounds coevolve. This may sound overly simplistic, but just under the surface, things get complex. When you drill down into the relationship between audio recording and its associated visual media, a complex ecosystem of delivery technologies, mechanical inventions, distribution channels, and marketing efforts emerges. We might begin to explore this complexity by looking at some artifacts. Fortunately, the recording industry is an artifact-generating machine.