Computer-mediated Textuality?

.

"Today we are living in the last age of print" Jay David Bolter .

"Our entire collective subjective history - the soul of our societal body- is encoded in print" Sven Birkerts

 

Being Digital

Nicholas Negroponte argued in 'Being Digital' that the key feature of computers is that their files are digital (Negroponte 1995). Being digital is important to the production and aesthetics of text because, as Richard Wise pointed out, it makes these texts highly "amenable to manipulation by a computer" (Wise 2000).

 

Opening the Space Guide

http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/transition

"Despite their persistent identity crisis, all computer-mediated writings do have at least one thing in common – they must be viewed through the medium of an electronic display, usually a screen but sometimes just audio, via a PC or Mac, a laptop, a PDA, a mobile phone, data projector, or perhaps even a giant outdoor image. Their uniting characteristic is that the computer is an essential component of the writing and without it the work would not exist."

• Connectivity?

• Interactivity?

• Computability?

What were the forerunners of computer-mediated Textual Art?

• Experimental Literature?
• Dada?
• Oulipo?
• Concrete Poetry?
• Sound Poetry?
• Fluxus?
• Conceptual Art?
  Role Playing Games?
• Dungeons and Dragons?
• Graphic Novels?
• Runes?
• I Ching?
• Tax Manuals?
• Telephone Conversations?

Some Examples

1. Small Poems by Peter Howard
2. Not Poems by Adele Aldridge
3. Bembo's Zoo by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
4. Oh by Dan Waber, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher & Reiner Strasser
5. Xylo by Peter Howard
6. Shopping List by Helen Whitehead
7. Lotus Blossom by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
8. The Stone Wall by Terry Persun
9. Cog by Loss Pequeño Glazier
10. 253 or Tube Theatre, a novel by Geoff Ryman
11. What Fits? by Adrienne Eisen
12. Uncle Roger (2003 Revised Edition) by Judy Malloy
13. Safara in the Beginning by Christy Sheffield Sanford
14. redridinghood by Donna Leishman
15. The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam by Martyn Bedford and Andy Campbell
16. The Unknown - William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, Frank Marquardt
17. Michael Atavar
18. Vniverse by Stephanie Strickland
19. Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] by Talan Memmott
20. Postcards from Writing by Sally Pryor
21. Swarm by Jane Prophet
22. War Room by Alan Sondheim and Simon Mills
23. soundpoem three by Jörg Piringer
24. Grammatron by Mark Amerika

Polymedia?

Word and Image in Computer-mediated Textual Art: sites for thinking about polymedia

http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/Review/index.cfm?article=118

 

"We suggest that one of the distinguishing features of electronic or new media literature is that it is - or can be - polymedia, and that one of the things that makes it "new" is not only that it often contests distinctions between poetry, prose, exposition, and other literary genres, but that it borrows ideas and approaches (mixing and re-mixing them) from the art world." 

Is this a unique feature of Digital Media? What about the mingling of sound and vision in opera?

 

"Indeed, reading and looking at electronic literature as it is produced and played out among texts, audiences, and institutions is a powerful reminder that the meaning of the term "literature" itself is always up for grabs - and that "electronic" literature, whatever the future might hold for it, is the site of many important conversations, struggles, and debates."

What is Literature? What is Creative Writing?

Contribution or Collaboration or Community?

Decade Quilt (2005) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/decade/

"In the last ten years there has been an explosion of new technology, especially related to computers and the internet, and for some of us it has changed forever the way we live and write. As the trAce Online Writing Centre reaches its tenth anniversary, we invite you to reflect on your own personal decade of living and writing with technology."

.

Is the whole more than the sum of its parts?

.

What else is computer-mediated textual art?

• mobile phone displays?

• gallery installations?

• video and computer games

return to main page