Rita Raley

!e spare white screen that opens María Mencía’s interactive Flash work, Another Kind of Language (2001), offers three choices to its users, presets that will determine the language of the typographic and sonographic field: A (Arabic), C (Mandarin Chinese), or E (English).1 !e structure of each is the same: mousing over the screen reveals fragments of linguistic signs and phonemes vocalized in broken and abbreviated bursts of sound, almost as if by a chorus performing vocal exercises. Intuitively, one might be given to think that moving the mouse is an inscriptional process with alphabetic characters activating spoken sounds, but what becomes clear is that the association of characters with sounds is neither necessary nor motivated; rather, what unfolds on the surface of the screen is the performance of an inscriptional process. Another Kind of Language explores the visual aspects of writing in the three languages even as it violates their respective structures for the presentation of text. !e screen does not function as a rectilinear grid that constrains the movement of the mouse, nor does it approximate a page with its stabilizing spatial coordinates (topand left-centric orientation for English). It instead resembles an unlined sketch pad in that the user can draw lines and shapes as he or she chooses. In this sense, the signs, or fragments of signs, are linear not in syntactic structure but in their temporal unfolding. Signification is at once seemingly proffered and withheld: the alphabetic characters are at times incomplete and at others clustered together as material rather than semantic typographic marks. So, too, the phonemes are primarily nonsyntactical eruptions of sounds punctuated by recognizable syl-