Page 204 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

CELEBRITY INTERVIEW ARTISTIC VISION
TRENDS AND MOVEMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART

UMBERTO ECO:
A MASTER OF INTERDISCIPLINARY AND
INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE

UMBERTO ECO AND COMPUTER GAMES: THE RENOWNED WRITER AND
SCHOLAR WHO CREATED INFLUENTIAL AND INNOVATION WORKS TO EXPLORE
UMBERTO ECO. ITALIAN AUTHOR, LITERARY CRITIC, CULTURE IN NEW WAYS.
SEMIOTICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER.
“Professor Eco, you’re a man of letters, a writer, philosopher, a historian. On
the desk beside you is a computer. Is modern computer technology actually
functional for you as an author and literary researcher?”
Eco glances over at the computer, smiles, then nods thoughtfully:
Yes, but sometimes the computer can also give paralyzing results. I will give
you an example: I was invited by Jerusalem University to a symposium whose
theme was the image of Jerusalem and the temple as an image through the
centuries. I did not know what to do on this particular topic.
Then I said to myself, well OK, I have worked with stuff from the beginning of
the Middle Ages; my dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas.
He points to the rows of well-filled bookshelves on my left...
Here I have all the works of Thomas Aquinas with a reasonably good index,
and I looked there to see how many times he quoted Jerusalem and tried to
say what use he made of the image of Jerusalem. Now, if I only had these
A chain-smoking and jovial Umberto Eco books - well, that index is a reasonable index which focuses only on the
receives me in his crowded, untidy but larger, more intensive treatments of the word ‘Jerusalem’ - I would have found
cheerful little office at the Institute for say 10 or 15 tokens of ‘Jerusalem’ which I would have been able to examine.
Communication Studies at the University of Unfortunately I now have the Aquinas hypertext...
Bologna. A bay-window opens out onto a He glances again at the computer in the corner... and there I found, that there
tiny balcony overlooking the garden of the were - well I don’t remember the exact number - but there were round 11,000
villa where the institute has its offices and or so tokens...
library. The walls of the office are covered Working with 11,000 references is just impossible. That’s far too many.
with rows of well-filled bookshelves; a sofa “So the system you use doesn’t ‘filter’ well enough in other words?”
along one wall is full of piles of papers, books I cannot manage to scan as many as 11,000 tokens. Now, if I had only my old
and articles, a modest writing desk hidden traditional limitations then I would probably have done something more or
under even more books and papers. In one less reasonable on that particular topic.
corner of the room is an IBM 486 clone with “That’s because the human person who is searching does it in a kind of
Windows, a new article or book obviously in sensible, intuitive way, whereas the computer just does it in a very mechanical
progress on the screen. Eco offers me a chair way and just picks out every single example?”
in front of his desk. In advance I had given My theory is that there is no difference between the Sunday New York Times
him a list of some possible issues we might and the Pravda of the old days. The Sunday New York Times that can have 600
discuss so he would have some idea of what or 700 pages altogether really just contains old news fit to print. But one week
was on my mind: Computer technology, the is not enough to read a number of the Sunday New York Times. So therefore,
Internet community and processes of cultural the fact that the news items are there is irrelevant, or immaterial, because
change. I begin by asking.

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