consumption

This paper discusses the incorporation of text within interactive installations as an expression of cultural anthropophagy. This “consumption” is carried out not by displacing the text (i.e. replacing it with images) but by transforming text into image, sound or action, or into a post-alphabetic object (i.e. depriving the text of its linguistic value). As shown in detailed examples, the de-semanticization of text turns words into ornament, while in other cases (where the linguistic value of the text is stressed within the interactive installation or can be “rescued” from it) the literary is still an important subject of attention

(Abstract from Leonardo, MIT Press abstract)

These days, commonplaces are repeated about contemporary literatures: new readers, new ways of reading, globalization, etc., because we are witnessing a global change in the way of leaving and interacting, an unprecedented acceleration of the circulation of products and materials, of people, texts and memories that make us learn and look into the world in a different way. The national and global imaginaries coexist and are producing literatures, but, in fact, we do not find enough contrasted experiences and studies that show us how these two imaginaries are working together. It is time for us to ask whether interrelations between global, regional, national, social, generational, sexual memories are modifying the patterns of production and consumption of reading of digital literatures in a very particular way and, in this case, it is also time to change the way in which we approach the text and the way we teach and learn literature. In the frame of the experiences and the research that our Research Group (Leethi) has developed on rituals for e-readings and strategies to read e-literatures and focusing on e-Literature written in Spanish, we will try to answer to these questions: - Concerning the extension and multiplication of media, Is this really modifying local, digital, literary production? Then, do they really exist local, rooted, national literary productions? How does it work with e-productions when the text goes beyond the language? - About our space in the Internet, do they exist national borders? How do readers need to carry across them to enter a global arena through mass media, social networks, blogs, video-games, virtual repositories, etc., to read digital literatures? It is the language the new boundary for readers? - What connective structures are activated to read e-literatures? Which one is the new global imaginary that let us read and understand transcultural productions? Is it related to science, networks or videogames? Which are the new cultural icons? Is there any kind of global memory which e-literatures are contributing to produce? - How could e-Literature help us as teachers to wide the view of our students and to show them a transnational world? In this contribution, we will try to ask to some of these questions by studying some very concrete hispanophone examples of e-literatures in which we could find signs of all these items.

A polymorphic poem (polypoem) is a generative digital artwork that is constructed differently upon each instantiation, but can be meaningfully constrained according to aspects such as theme, metaphor, affect, and discourse structure. The Generative Visual Renku project presents a new form of concrete polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and generative models from contemporary art. Calligraphic iconic illustrations are conjoined by the GRIOT system into a fanciful topography articulating the nuanced interplay between organic (natural or hand-created) and modular (mass-produced or consumerist) artifacts that saturate our lives. GRIOT, which is a system for composing generative and interactive narrative and poetic works, is used to semantically constrain generated output both visually and conceptually. On the one hand, this project extends the GRIOT architecture's support for composing graphics and has resulted in new theory to provide cognitive and semiotic groundings for the extension. On the other hand, as a work of art, it is self-reflexive in that the content concerns the modularity of consumption and production in many contemporary post-industrial societies, while the research agenda and theoretical framework are concerned with modularity of semantic units in digital media arts.

Since the industrial age, modularity has revolutionized our everyday lives. For the sake of efficiency and optimization, things and activities were shaped into mass-produced interchangeable units, including our furniture, our dwelling places, our commuting, our consumptions, our entertainments, and our identities. In consumerist societies, modularity always lies at the center, whereas the complements are just scattered peripheries. Life is a journey back and forth between clustered majorities and isolated minorities.