- panoptican society - The term is Foucault's. See Discipline and Punish and below.
- post-industrial society - The phrase, post-industrial society, is Daniel Bell's, and the concept will be expanded upon below. As Jameson notes, the concept of 'post-industrial society' (along with 'the end of ideologies') announced in the 50s, was to become dramatically true in the 70s and 80s. (Jameson, 1991:159)
- laager - The term 'laager' stems from the Afrikaans word to describe ox wagons, drawn into an enclosing circle, thus forming a 'fortres' for protection and self defence. The most famous laager in South African history was the laager drawn against the army of the Zulu king "Dingaan", from where the Boers won the battle of Bloedrivier (Bloodriver).
During the era of apartheid the term came to describe the outdated 'laager mentality' of isolation, ignorance and conservatism of the National Party.
- servo mechanism - 'A servo mechanism - or "slave mechanism" - is a device that has several distinctive features. (1) It has a mechanical part that is to be moved to a desired position. (2) It has the means of sensing the error between the desired position and the actual position of the part in question. (3) The error information is fed back to the motor that is driving the machine so that the area is reduced to zero ... The development of servo mechanisms was, to a great extent, stimulated by military needs - to control large-scale artillery, and to correct for the movement of elusive targets. (Rothman 1972: 23)
- entropy - The loss of energy in the randomised movement of molecules is termed entropy. Because the energy given up in this fashion is unrecuperable, time is irreversible. In the 1860s Maxwell gave a more rigorous theoretical account of entropy which became known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For further discussion see Porush (1985).
- machine illustrators - At the same time the whole of the cultural sphere was being transformed through the new philosophies of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx.
- postmodernity - The term 'post-modernism' is generally used by theorists who regard 'it' as a complete break with modernism. Conversely, 'postmodernism' is used to portray an artistic strategy which continues the concerns of modernism, but is situated within a highly differentiated cultural, social and economic field, that of the post-industrial, as discussed above. As such I have elected to use the latter form of the term when referring to my own work. (See Jameson, 1991: 55-66).
- fibre-optic - Fibre-optic cables use light to transmit data. Today all forms of information, from text to sound to graphics to video, are being digitized - transformed into 'bytes' of computer-readable information. When information is digitized, it can be easily transmitted by telephone wire. The old copper wire used for telephone systems will never match the capacity of a fibre-optic network, which can transmit at speeds up to twenty gigabits (twenty billion bits of information per second). The best speeds hoped for from copper wire is twenty kilobites (twenty thousand bits per second). (See Rucker 1993: 114)
- Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) - Indeed a whole genre of 'apocalyptic writing' has appeared in South Africa since the early 70s. See Karel Schoeman, Na die Geliefde Land; Elsa Joubert, Die Laaste Sondag; Nadine Gordimer, July's People; J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K. These concerns are reflected in the work of a number of South African artists, such as William Kentridge, Gavin Younge, Jo Ractliffe and David Brown.
- an environment - The environment created by Ettiene le Roux in Sewe Dae by die Silbersteins (with its metaphorical similarities to Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians) influenced me, as did his archaic representation of the Afrikaans' psyche.
- MIG - This process consists of the welding of metals in a gas shielded atmosphere. The metal electrode is fed through a gun (electrode holder) and into the arc at the same speed at which the electrode is melted and deposited in the weld. The operation of the gun is controlled by a trigger mechanism which, through relays, controls the arc current, the shielding gas flow, and the electrode wire movement to the arc. (See Althouse, 1980: 275-286)
- TIG - This process uses a non-consumable tungsten electrode. The electrode is mounted in a special electrode holder which is also designed to create a flow of shielding gas around the arc. The process consists of striking an arc between the base metal and a tungsten electrode in an atmosphere of shielding gas (helium, argon or a shielding gas mixture). The filler metal is applied in a manner similar to the method used in gas welding. (See Althouse, 1980: 264-275)
- Cor-Ten steel - Cor-Ten steels have enhanced atmospheric corrosion resistance when compared with, ordinary carbon steel and may be used in the bare condition with suitable precautions in most outdoor atmospheres. (See ISCOR, 1990)
