In general, phenomena like the Face of Mars are diagnosed as a species of pareidolia *. From the Greek original (para + eidolon) we can probably freely translate it as a kind of "pseudo-image." People see or hear something familiar where it doesn't really exist. In this case, it's a big face-like landscape on the Cydonia region of the planet Mars, which has been the hotbed of E.T. speculation for ages.
In itself, there is nothing wrong with this mental tendency to see resemblances between one thing and another. It is part of our habits of recognition to see patterns and associate them for interpretation. Like in the famous ink-blot tests, out of an amorphous field of black and white, familiar images are visualized. There is nothing surprising here anymore. What could be more interesting is to do the reverse, if this can be done. What if, among the familiar things we see or read everyday, we suddenly stop recognizing, or become illiterate, dyslexic, or be struck with prosopagnosia (unable to recognize faces anymore)? Or become aphasiacs and display symptoms like inability to comprehend language, excessive neologism, paraphasia, agrammatism, inability to form words and name objects, and so on?
Now, to relate these symptoms to some current writing may not be flattering, but that is what I want to propose just so that the mechanism of interpretation via resemblance could be retooled on another literary level. Of course, with them, it is not a medical case at all, but the employment of a willful stylistic and para-linguistic radicality. By loosening the reign of historically-determined congealment of semiotic patterns and forms, post-literate writing has emphasized the obsessive tendency of the mind to see patterns and meanings where they no longer exist or where their existence can no longer be absolutely valid.
We can start with the works of Billy Bob Beamer, whose typographical experiments echo a long line of artists since the Futurists and visual poetry. The stylistic range of his massive output, mostly called Pomes, can't be covered in a brief mention like this, where I could only focus on a few aspects. The primary thing that strikes you when looking at one of his works is that most of the time you won't find a normally-spelled word. Like with many writers using the same method, in Beamer the lexical borders vibrate and expand, the dependencies loosen, and the arrow of reading becomes a polymorphic web of associated features. Formalization is redistributed and textuality is barely hanging together (counter-syntax). Beamer raises inscription towards the liberty of signatures with playful fonts, and the combinatory logic is disturbed through dissections and disjunctions of lexical matter, with spellings jumbled or intersected, and words and letters colliding in the axes of combination and selection to form half-words and half-sentences.
P[o[]m]em[e
[t]e[me]m[easa]unit[pro]vide[s
a co]ne[nie]t[me]ns o[f ds]cusi[ng] a [pie]e o[f h]oug[t c]op[id ]fr[o
pe]top[[eso]n ", [r]ega[rdle]s[soof whe]po[the[r
th]a[t [t]ho]ugh[t co]n]t]ain[s ot[her]s in[sid]e i[t,] or flo[rm]s p[ar]t of a
[la[rg]em[e]m]e[.]m]em[e c]ou[l]d con[sis]t of [a sin]gle w[ord], [o]r a [m[[e]]me[
co]ul]d co]n[s[is]t o[f[nie]t[ th]e] e[n]tir[e[ spe]ech] i[nwh]ch[ that word]
fr[st oc[c]r[red.] h]s f[o]ms[ an an]al[gy t]o thidea o[f a e[ne s] asin[le
u]it[ o[f ]s][le]plic]a]t]in[g i[n[fo]m[ato[]n fond o]n [t]h
s[elf-]re[pl]catin]g[cho]so[mo]on[e s[elf-]re[pl]catin]g[cho]so[mo]on[e
Copy-pasting the para-textual output of Beamer requires care since in many of his works he plays with font types and sizes, even with letter colors as well. From the sample above, you may be able to assemble some syntactic thread if you squint close enough for a normalizing read. One of the major "words" we may recover is "meme," a key term in theories of cultural evolution, referring to a cluster of ideas or behavior similar to trends, fashion, and styles. After reconstructing some syntax and googling, it appears that Beamer was quoting from an entry that could also be found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme):
The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.
Altering a copied text almost beyond recognition is of course a standard method since the Dadaists and Fluxus. The parasitic relationship could be analyzed in different directions, but I just want to look at the way the brackets confuse the flow of the textual original, disrupting its thought and syntax. There are also letters or words missing. In general, it appears that the sentence sequence remained the same. If this is a major writing method that involves some kind of over- or re-writing of copied textual matter, it could be used as a main avenue in making sense of Beamer's output and writing technique. This deformative repetition makes us ask what relationship this altered text has not only with the copied text but also with other themes like reading, information transfer, language, digital type formats, the internet, and knowledge in general. By disturbing the format of the copied text, it becomes harder to read the "message" and undermines the very concept of memes: the copying of thought and idea involves a real effort at reconstruction. The resemblances between texts, words, and language, like the resemblances or identities of memes in their course of evolution is made to look much closer to reconstructive surgery than to a genetic DNA transfer.
The profusion of brackets also reminded me of syntax diagrams in the theory of Dependency Grammar. However, since "how the presence and the direction of syntactic dependencies are determined is of course often open to debate” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar), word order and semantic order stop becoming absolutely homomorphic. In addition, lexical integrity is also ruptured, so that we won't easily recognize one word without seeing other words before, after, or inside other words. Signs, after all, have no positive or absolute values. The alphabetical forms fall into their brackets like figures in a chance-driven slot machine, or carved or drawn out (abstracted) from their niches. It is a radical procedure of syllabication and diagram-making, creating or destroying signs within signs, or messages within messages, allowing noise to burst in and alter not only meanings but also fixed and illusory resemblances to a lexicality, a syntacticity (syntaxis, put together), and a textuality (textus, woven together) that we had known before. In the end, it seems that words and texts, even the face of language itself, are not operating under the logic of simple transfers, but must be reconstructed in toto via imaginary resemblances like on a barren, alien landscape.
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* Pareidolia (pron.: /pærɨˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-doh-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek words para (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead") in this context meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of; and the noun eidōlon (εἴδωλον "image, form, shape") the diminutive of eidos. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia).
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