A Sign of the Times: @ Is Art!

(March 23) -- It's a sign of (and for) the times: The @ symbol, found so commonly these days in Internet correspondence and yet so difficult to agreeably name, has officially been deemed a piece of contemporary art.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan announced today that it has inducted the @ symbol into its Department of Architecture and Design collection, citing the symbol's "elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time, the essence of modern."

It will join the Volkswagen Beetle and the classic Bic Pen as practical inventions the museum has found possess significant artistic value.

"The @ symbol is now part of the very fabric of life all over the world," wrote senior curator Paola Antonelli in a blog post on MoMA's website. "Being in the public realm, @ is free. It might be the only truly free -- albeit not the only priceless -- object in our collection."

Antonelli noted the fact that the @ symbol, also called by its older, less-familiar name, "commercial at" in English, has inspired a range of different analogies to animals in various countries around the world.

While many consider it to be a "monkey's tail," other illustrative terms include "snail" (French), "dog" (Russian) and "sign of the meow" (Finnish). British newspaper The Guardian assembled a long list of nicknames from its readers, which include more abstract terms like "squiggle."

Whatever one calls it, there can be little denying the importance the @ symbol has acquired in the era of electronic communications: Not only is it the standard designation for everyone's e-mail addresses, but in the past three years, it has migrated to become the preferred preface for referring to a specific person on the social networks Twitter and Facebook.

But where did the @ symbol originate in the first place? Here again, MoMA is able to shed some light.

While there is not any precise date ascribed to the first appearance of the @ in writing, Antonelli claims that around the "sixth or seventh century [A.D.]," @ emerged as a kind of creative shorthand for the Latin word ad, which meant "at," "to," or "toward." It was later appropriated by merchants in Medieval Spain to describe a unit of measure, finally popping up on the American typewriter in 1885.

But if there can be one person who safely can be credited with "modernizing" the @ into something approaching its present usage, that honor would go to American electrical engineer Ray Tomlinson, who created and sent the first e-mail in 1971 while working on the Defense Department computer network ARPANET, the early prototype to today's Internet.

As NPR put it in a profile of Tomlinson last year:

By way of his invention, Tomlinson is also responsible for the elevation of the @ sign from symbol to icon. To send messages between different computers, he needed a way to separate the names of senders and recipients from the names of their machines. The @ sign just made sense; it wasn't commonly used in computing back then, so there wouldn't be too much confusion.

Or, in Tomlinson's own words on his Web site: "I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense. The purpose of the at sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). I used the at sign to indicate that the user was 'at' some other host rather than being local."

Although Tomlinson has said that he forgot the contents of the first e-mail, which was just random gibberish, there is no doubt that his decision inexorably altered human communications. Little wonder why MoMA believes that "Tomlinson performed a powerful act of design ... His (unintended) role as a designer must be acknowledged and celebrated ..."

But therein lies a significant quandary: Exactly how to put a universal typographic mark on display? The Wall Street Journal reports that: "The museum will exhibit "@" somewhere on its walls, possibly as a silkscreen and accompanied by a label explaining its history and its influence on design and typography ... Its typeface will even be described, just as the label for a chair includes details about its upholstery."

According to The New York Times, however, MoMA views @ less as a piece of static visual art, like a painting, and more like a dynamic performance: "MoMA decided against adding a specific version of the @ to the collection in favor of using it in different typographic styles and sizes." As such, the honor is "as good as it gets in the design world, rather like bagging a Tony on Broadway or an Oscar in Hollywood."