Çatalhöyük's "mutable immobiles"

Image from http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/jghsillustration/

Since reading John Swogger's treatise on the transparent, mutable illustrations for the Çatalhöyük project, I decided to evaluate the efficacy of these images. Perusing the Çatalhöyük Project's website, though, I did not come across any of the "intermediary" images that Swogger hoped to make widely available. Even on his own website, all images are finished images. Undoubtedly, the extra effort in making the intermediate pictures available, and of encouraging a viewership, was detrimental to progress at Çatalhöyük.

The power of an image, as Swogger failed to recognize, is not the amount of pure, a-textual information that it contains, but its deceptively simple appearance. An illustration is easy to ingest, easy to remember, and easy to replicate.

Bruno Latour explains the rise of modern science with the development of inscriptions, or what he describes as immutable mobiles. Using the example of La Perouse, an explorer for Louis XV, who travelled to China to acquire a map to bring back to France to settle a dispute over the land's geography, Latour notes:

"If you wish to go out of your way, and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. You have to go out and come back with the "things"if your moves are not to be wasted. But the "things" have to be able to withstand the trip without withering away."

John Swogger's mutable images can't mobilize. They require too much effort for viewers to go out of their ways to understand their meaning, and too much energy to transfer to new contexts.