Visuality of text, a workshop at Warwick University

Last Saturday 20th October, our colleagues from Warwick University organised the workshop “Visuality of Text: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Display of the Word”, an opportunity that the CREWS project could not miss. What made this workshop especially interesting was the truly interdisciplinary nature of this event, which brought together academics researching material writing and professionals and artists whose work involves the display of texts.

The workshop started with three historical case studies from very different periods that showed the use of text on objects. Archaic Greek sculpture was covered by Nick Brown, Harry Prance presented on Byzantine eucharistic objects and Katherine Cross focused on Anglo-saxon weaponry.

Nikandre, the statue who speaks

Natalia has been talking about the Nikandre statue, whose inscription speaks directly to the reader, in the Classics Faculty’s #30secondsclassics video series.

You can read a little more about the statue in Natalia’s earlier post on talking objects.

 

Talking objects

In Ancient Greece people would write on almost any kind of object. For example, votes to send a politician to exile for 10 years were written on pottery sherds! This practice of the Athenian democracy was called ostracism because the name for “sherds” in Ancient Greek is ὄστρακα (ostraka).

Fragments of ceramic with votes for ostracism. Picture taken by the author: Agora Museum, Athens.