Article in a print journal

In 2001, Florian Cramer wondered whether ‘the theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted... from perceiving computer data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in such notions as ‘hypertext’, ‘hyperfiction’, ‘hyper-/multimedia’) towards paying attention to the very codedness–that is, textuality–of digital systems themselves' (Cramer, 2001). I want to extend this focus on the codedness of computer-based textuality into a technosocial ‘phenomenology’ of the text-as-apparatus. These texts cannot be understood separately from the apparatus that displays and performs them. ‘Trilogical’ relationships exist between humans and apparatuses that are revealed during the performance of the text-as-apparatus. The trilogue acknowledges the apparatus as an entity that, while lacking consciousness, possesses a pseudo-agency with ramifications for the interpretations of such texts. The result is new types of creative relationships, in which different concepts of language compete, and hopefully combine, to create new types of meaning.

Reading is a multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read. With digital technology, reading manifests itself as being extensively multi-sensory – both in more explicit and more complex ways than ever before. In different ways from traditional reading technologies such as the codex, digital technology illustrates how the act of reading is intimately connected with and intricately dependent on the fact that we are both body and mind – a fact carrying important implications for even such an apparently intellectual activity as reading, whether recreational, educational or occupational. This article addresses some important and hitherto neglected issues concerning digital reading, with special emphasis on the vital role of our bodies, and in particular our fingers and hands, for the immersive fiction reading experience.

Whenever the program of a work is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, it may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the artist is given four options when dealing with the lability of the electronic device: (1) she demands the ‘right’context of reception for his work – a requirement which, over time, will be confronted with the impossibility to preserve obsolete machines, software and operating systems; (2) she ‘re-enchants’ the lability of the electronic device and ascribes a ‘technological sublime’ to it; (3) she simply ignores the lability of the digital device and creates at once, as if the digital framework was immutable; (4) she is fully aware of the instable environment in which his digital creation will be updated; he even considers the ephemeral and uncontrollable nature of his work as its fundamental aesthetic principle. This most radical approach would then consist in letting the work slowly decompose, as well as in accepting his changing forms and updates and in taking up the possibility of incidents and unexpected events. In Tramway, one of my experimental poetic works that I present and analyse in this article, the instability of the device is metaphorized on the surface of the screen; it is thematized in the relationship between the figures of ‘manipulation’ and the manipulable textual context; it is also theorized in a critical paratext which is based, for example, on the actual presentation of the work in this journal issue. A second work, Pond, is located on the border between the aesthetics of the ephemeral, in which the author accepts the slow decay of his/her work, and the aesthetics of re-enchantment, in which the author ascribes the digital device with a hope of survival, with a spectral characteristic linked to the materiality of the programmed matter and which remains despite the changes it undergoes on the electronic device.

Source: author's abstract

This article explores media-related aspects of literariness and examines them on the basis of spoken and written language in new media art, in order to rethink the role of philology. The working hypothesis is that new media art does, in fact, possess the potential for literary analysis; the article is therefore intended as a case for the expansion of literary studies, its paradigms and methodologies. Literature, poetic structures and elements play a significant role in many new media artworks – a fact that has been overlooked so far by both media studies and literary scholarship. The article investigates this new, complex interdisciplinary field in an exemplary analysis. To expand the application of literary studies to new developments in the arts, including new media art working with language, one has to acknowledge that orally performed texts are as complex in their aesthetic presentation and poetic signification as written and printed literary works, and are therefore to be viewed as just as relevant subjects of research. In the introduction (part one), the research question will be contextualized within contemporary trends in research, in particular within discourse concerning the ›pictorial turn‹. It will be argued that the impulse to analyze audiovisual art from the standpoint of art history (Bildwissenschaft) or media studies generally overlooks or underestimates linguistic and literary components. However, in these artworks it is often the complex interplay between orality and scriptuality that creates poetic effects. The second part of the article will introduce the concept and genres of new media art and distinguish four central aesthetic strategies that are relevant for ›philological‹ analysis: (1) the integration of written texts or printed words with a poetic intention into new media art; (2) the use of verbalized language in an explicitly poetic manner; (3) the handling of pre-existing works of literature and their transformation into audiovisual art; and (4) the exploration and adaptation of literary genres by new media artists. The concept of literariness in literary theory will be discussed in the third part of the article, as it has been developed, amongst others, by Russian formalists, the Prague school and various literary scholars in the English and German speaking realm. The general aim will be the application of these notions of literariness to the poetic use of language in new media art. The main focus will be on the notion of poetic ›deviation‹ (Abweichung) and the increased self-referentiality of poetic language that is created by way of a »foregrounding of the utterance« (Mukařovský 2007, 19). Overall, poetic language can be perceived as such if it is ostentatious or if it intentionally creates alienation, a heightened awareness of its materiality, or an ›aesthetic surplus‹ that exceeds the mere communicative act. In the parts four to six the article will then analyze three recent video art works: Keren Cytter’s single-channel video Dreamtalk (2005), Freya Hattenberger’s video performance installation Pretty Girl (2008), and Magdalena von Rudy’s single-channel video Regnava nel silenzio (2008). These works have been chosen as divergent and aesthetically innovative pieces by young and upcoming female new media artists working in the German cultural context, and as representative examples for a recent trend in video art to generate complex narrative and aesthetic structures that strongly rely upon language. The three works will be examined in close readings focusing on the use of language and literary structures, both in scriptural and in oral language. It will be shown that these video artworks integrate elements from all three literary genres – drama (e. g. choral speech, teichoscopy), poetry (repetitions, parallelisms, rhyme, semantic ambiguieties, etc.), and epic prose (narrative voices, literary ekphrasis). Furthermore, it is argued that these new media art works create and make use of an ›aesthetic surplus‹ by way of a highly conscious and ostentatious use of language that is viewed and presented as an artistic material and a poetic ›tool‹. They also raise the question of agency inasmuch as all three video works play with inauthentic or figurative discourse, which is either articulated by someone else and only performed second-hand, or presented as ›re-presentation‹ as such. Moreover, in two of the three works discussed the speakers are not conceptualized as characters articulating ›themselves‹ at all, but as mere vocal instances mediating external content. Such experimental work with language definitively exceeds existing parameters of figural speech and character analysis both in film analysis and narratology. The language used by the speakers refers to its act of articulation as such, or works with iterations and other forms of language ›deviation‹ in actio. With regard to the concept of literariness, such linguistic strategies must be considered poetic.

A holographic poem, or holopoem, is a poem conceived, made and displayed holographically. This means, first of all, that such a poem is organized non-linearly in an immaterial three-dimensional space and that even as the reader or viewer observes it, it changes and gives rise to new meanings. Thus as the viewer reads the poem in space — that is, moves around the hologram—he or she constantly modifies the structure of the text. A holopoem is not a poem composed in lines of verse and made into a hologram, nor is it a concrete or visual poem adapted to holography. The sequential structure of a line of verse corresponds to linear thinking, whereas the simultaneous structure of a concrete or visual poem corresponds to ideographic thinking. The poem written in lines, printed on paper, reinforces the linearity of poetic discourse, whereas the visual poem sets words free on the page. Like poetry in lines, visual poetry has a long ancestry, which runs from Simias of Rhodes, through the Baroque poets, to the Modernists Marinetti, Tzara, Cummings and Apollinaire, and most recently to the experimental poets of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Holopoetry project creates a new poetic language through the improbable possibilities of immaterial, textual volumes, produced through the holographic process. The main problem in poetic expression today is not one of compositional unit (from letter to sentence), but one of syntax, which is no longer organized in a line (“undimensional flow of signs” — Max Bense), or structured on a flat surface (“a textual surface” — Bense). With holopoetry, syntax is organized in discontinuous space. Instead of reducing the rhythm to the limitations of a flat surface, holopoetry makes it possible to create a poetic language in which it does not matter if one is using phrasal, vocabular, syllabic or literal structures — expression is similar to the enigmatic states of conscience and spaciotemporality is used on an extreme, pluridimensional level of complexity. This new holistic perception, source of the fruition of real immaterial objects, volumes without mass, requires a response in the structure of language: the possibility to transform the instrument of intellectualization — the word — into a sign as fluid and elastic as thought. By taking over an optic or, better yet an optronic system of production, distributing the elements of the composition in the surrounding space and registering this information on a flat device, holopoetry launches a perceptual syntax, relativizing the cognitive process according to the different points of observation in space.

Revised German version of Looking Behind the Façade