According to Amy Elias, Paul Maltby’s negation of the mystical Other forecloses ‘the most interesting conversation’: between a critic who does not believe in visionary moments and those writers and critics who do believe in them.
Aaron Pease reviews Manual DeLanda’s philosophy of the virtual.
When materials that support texts change, the content have to change. Matters is a physical reflection on how the materiality could affect the text. From ceramic tiles to displays, each new supporting material has opened new possibilities for writing.
The support does more than sustain the text, it limits and potentiates it at the same time. The rules of the text are established thanks to these materials, which are implemented as a medium for the text. The physical, the chemical, the sociology, and the politics of these mediums definitively influence the literary use of the ideas.
The change in supporting materials allow us to tap into new possibilities that poetry has the pleasure of exploring and amplifying. Similarly, the poetic endeavour is obligated to question the physical, chemical, social, and political limitations of either medium as a support for the text. The expressive reflection allows the revision of rules established by the use of either format and, perhaps, generates new uses of a medium; or in an extreme case, generates a new medium for the diffusion of the text.
In this case, a combination of nonconventional materials has been used in the text, which are manipulated thanks to the use of simple electronics that creates magnetic fields either through audio to generate vibrations or through a sequential movement.
Drawer 1 – “Paper alive”: we use speakers to create a surface in constant vibration on which we will place a mixing of non-newtonian fluid. The system respond by a proximity sensor: The closer the viewer to the drawer, the greater vibration intensity of the surface. The vibration excite the non-Newtonian fluid allowing the viewer to read some parts of the text that lies beneath the surface.
Drawer 2 – “Blot alive”: This work requires a slow reading. This installation use a iron fillings, which will be manipulated with magnets to travel over a fixed text that never will be totally displayed. The blot moves very slowly and will cover parts of the text which meaning will be constantly changing through the movement of the magnetic filaments.
When we are talking about the new media art and e-literature we need to emphasize a crucial shift in
a very nature of today’s work of art; instead of a stable work of art (Ger. Kunstwerk) we are witnessing its transformation to the flexible service of art, to the performance and the event. As such it enters the present society shaped by the shifts from industrial society to postindustrial (and information) one, from material labor to immaterial, from Taylorist mode of production to postindustrial, e. g. a flexible one, from material artifact to its logo, from manufacturing to marketing of brands, from the economy of artifacts to the economy of financial markets and their products.
The flight of capital away from the productive economy (of material goods) into the financial
economy of more abstract instruments and services has caused many significant consequences also in the scope of production and its very phenomenology. Suddenly, by the stock exchange driven financial markets with the novel series of risky financial products (derivates) are becoming the crucial venues of spectacular events in the present society. The question needs to be raised, what are the novel concepts taken from the field of economy that might be applied in the (social) theory of e-literature?In this paper we aim first to explore the shift from industrial production to postindustrial prosumption in terms that the feedback from e-literary world (of readers, scholars, critics) is getting
more and more crucial for the producers of e-literary works. E-literature authors write and program
their pieces for e-literary world, which is not an abstract entity but as a living one consisted from
readers, (other) artists and experts who are able to steady contribute some basic information to the
authors.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)