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The difference is between enumerating a myriad of states and offering conditions for innumerability, or vectors as actionable instructions.

Given the practicalities of digital screen technologies, images all have to be rasterized by the time they are rendered. But as this happens on-the-fly at the time of rendering, it allows flexible scaling, necessary in applications such as digital maps or animations. Many images are bitmapped at their inception, such as digital photos, before being converted to scalable vector graphics.

Vector mapping (including Bézier curves) allows the transposition from dots into vectors and back to dots, or in the terms of our multimodal grammar, the transposition of states and actions. This supports interactive imaging applications where the user is involved in customizing the image presentation to suit their needs and interests.¹⁵⁹ Not only is the image a product of movement (action); it is movable (actionable) by the viewer.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is one of the key technologies of the web, in development as a foundational standard by the World Wide Web Consortium in 1999.¹⁶⁰ Participants in the nominally open process of standards development include representatives from a predictable cast of corporations, including Microsoft, Adobe, Google, and Apple – also Boeing, another modern enterprise with an obvious interest in the production of curves.

All major web browsers now support SVG, as well as billions of smart phones and other digital devices. When they do, it is the same, universal engine at work. Adobe’s Postscript, a page in development description language for electronic and print publishing in development since 1982, uses these vectoral principles. Adobe’s Illustrator imaging program runs on vector graphics, and it is possible to convert backwards and forwards between this and the bitmap manipulation software, Adobe Photoshop. Parallel to SVG has been another web standard, Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML, 1994), developed in parallel with the core language of the web, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and since renamed X3D.¹⁶¹

Analogue cinema was an earlier moment in the transformation of the affordances of the image, shifting the focus of imaging from entities, whose primary reference point in still photography was space, to the moving image, where the primary reference point was action. Scalable Vector Graphics and related technologies take this to a new stage. Not only does the source image prioritize action; the viewer can also engage with the image as an actor who affects the form of its presentation.

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¹⁵⁹ David Dailey, Jon Frost, and Domenico Strazzullo, 2012, Building Web Applications with SVG, Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press.

¹⁶⁰ www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/

¹⁶¹ www.web3d.org/x3d/ ; Vladimir Geroimenko and Chaomei Chen, eds., 2005, Visualizing Information Using SVG and X3D: XML-Based Technologies for the XML-Based Web, London, UK: Springer-Verlag.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 134-135. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Scalable Vector Graphics §MS1.2.2e