The video above (and the image on the home page) showcase 3D-Printed ‘Light Sculptures’ otherwise known as Zeotropes. While the sculpture rotates, a laser shines light to focus our attention along specific planes while many connected shapes that make up the Zeotrope pass through the beam of light. Our brains perceive an animation from the series of images that become seamless at 24 frames per second. Even though the thing itself is a 3-D object set in motion in a 4th dimension of time, our attention and our mind is a crucial factor in our experience of the ‘meaning’ of the Zeotrope.
When we experience poetry and literature we play a part in constructing meaning the way light shines on the Zeotrope only to reach our eye and interacte with our visual sense-making system. We create understanding dynamically through this ‘transaction’ as past experience and perspective inform a creative dialogue between person and artifact. Our understanding is also informed over time with ongoing and new experience, and in conversation with others.
A simple reminder of this ‘transactional’ nature of meaning in literature is the phrase, “Walk with light” which is both a simple pedestrian traffic instruction and a more profound piece of advice that can be open to interpretation.
When reading poetry & literature, listening to a song, or interpreting film, the experience and perspective of the audience is a vital part of our creation of meaning. Authors often write with this transactional quality in mind by playing with linguistic ambiguity. Words and syntax are like a moving matrix of potential meaning that requires the mind of a reader to participate in the creation of meaning.
The twin paradigms of ‘transactional meaning’ and ‘coduction’ contrast with a superficial view of a text as a container of static meaning that only needs to be decoded and decanted into a vessel (the reader).
To think that works of poetry and literature as if they have static meaning intended by an author is a fallacy that detracts from enjoyment and edification, as co-creators and potential architects of new literary and poetic devices. Authors will often point out this fallacy themselves, if we listen to them. To think of literature as if it has static meaning cheapens the rich conversations we might otherwise have if we recognize our own role as partners in meaning creation and even sense-making as we engage with literary works.