smao;ht

This blog centers on my considerations of cinema in the history of technology. The unusual title, smao;ht, comes from a happy coincidence: One day when I was in the middle of a particularly galvanizing Gmail chat with my good friend David I reached a point at which no words would express, well, whatever it was that I wanted to express, and rather than responding to the previous message with some carefully or not so carefully typed line, I simply struck my hands on the keyboard and produced: smao;ht.

I loved it. From the first moment. David seemed to like it as well. I don't know that I'll ever know exactly why it seemed so perfect, but if I were to impose a meaning, a reason, and a history of the exclamation, it would go something like this:

The semicolon (;) was introduced into typesetting by Aldus Manutius, a 15th century Italian scholar and printer, who is also credited with inventing italic type. Manutius originally used the symbol as a placesetter between opposing terms. As such, the semicolon inhabited the space between the poles of a binary. If there is anything that I would like this blog to do, it is that: to work in the space between binaries, to proceed in the spirit of deconstruction and perhaps, if we can say, in the spirit of the semicolon.