Two of these treatises, The Stomachion and The Method exist nowhere else in the world. This book is also the unique source for Archimedes' treatise On Floating Bodies in the original Greek. The Archimedes Palimpsest, as this book is called, has true claims to greatness: it is the earliest surviving Archimedes manuscript by about 400 years; it is the most important source for the diagrams that Archimedes drew in the sand in Syracuse, in the third century B.C. It is by far the most important evidence we have for the greatness of Archimedes. And Archimedes was a very great man”. Quoted from http://archimedespalimpsest.org/about/history/index.php ** https://www.jstor.org/stable/40212097 Hyperides lived from 390/389 to 322, and was thus nearly a contemporary with better known figures such as Demosthenes and Aristotle (both lived 384 to 322). He was a rhetor, or orator. Athenian rhetores were the most prominent politicians in the fourth-century democracy making speeches at public meetings of the citizen assembly and also serving as prosecutors and defendants in the courts. **(See: https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/readingviewing/Pages/litfocusmultimodal.aspx)
Why Bother to Create Parameters/Definitions for vispro? Primarily, I started to ‘bother’ as I felt my work was not ‘vispo’ – visual poetry*, with all the definitions such a term encompasses. Nico Vassilakis defines it as a clear response to language, whereas I would define vispro as a conceptual combination of prose and visual language : It tends to enhance the quantum aspects of language by focusing on the elemental design parts of language material. What’s that mean? People like fidgeting with alphabet… Though language is used as the common platform for communication, it’s prone to being creatively finessed in any number of ways. One of these is visually. Vispoets transmogrify, they undo the word, they reveal the potential locked in the word by visually deconstructing it. They replace language with other visual language. (https://bodyliterature.com/2014/02/24/what-is-vispo-an-interview-with-nico-vassilakis/ ) I found I was not ‘fiddling with the alphabet’, transmogrifying (transforming in an unusual way), or ultimately deconstructing. I was just writing prose in a visual manner in order to create an image. Whether the writing was automatic, asemic, large, small, coloured, written right to left, scrobed vertically or horizontally, I was making visual ‘ordinary language’ which follows some regular grammatical conventions and does not contain a formal metrical structure. My prose encompasses areas of human conversation (as defined on page 2) – it was/is not poetic at all. NOT to say that I am not a producer and lover of vispo – for sure I am, but there were different intentions at work in my paintings. For example, look at the differences in the two examples below:
(left): Palimpsest prose writing of different colours in paint. Layer 15 of painting titled Targeting Memories.2m x 2m, paint on canvas. (right): Cheryl Penn. No – None. Vispo. *You can think of vispo as poetry that focuses on the look of words and letters before, or instead of, their meaning. Or you can think of it as art that uses the components of written language as a means of exploring visual forms and patterns. Many more definitions and distinctions are possible. But most of all it is the work of visual poets itself that gives the fullest picture of what vispo is and can be. From http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~blc35/final/index.html
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