Postcard From Tunis

The artwork, Postcard From Tunis, is an Integrationist exploration of writing and its transformation at the human–computer interface. It is set in a personal portrait of Tunis, a city with a rich history of writing. The conventional view of real writing as representation of speech is shown to have serious limitations, which are addressed by Roy Harris’s radical reconsideration of writing. This approach is based on the Integrationist theory of human communication as the contextualized integration of activities by means of signs. Postcard From Tunis offers users who are not Arabic-literate the perception that there are actually no fixed boundaries between writing and pictures, as both are based on spatial configurations, and it suggests that the question of what is writing will differ from person to person (and moment to moment), depending on the macrosocial, biomechanical and circumstantial aspects of the activities integrated. User interaction with Postcard, particularly rollover activity, creates a variety of dynamic signs that cannot be theorised by a bipartite theory of signs and that transcend a distinction between the verbal and the non-verbal altogether.