Book (monograph)

Metainterface is about interface aesthetics and culture, and as an analytical strategy, it focuses on the tendency in art that reflects the contemporary interface; that is, on readings of artworks. In this sense, it presents contemporary art works, but it also reflects on the current challenges of contemporary interface culture in a situation where the computer’s interface seemingly both becomes omnipresent and invisible; where it at once is embedded in everyday objects and characterised by hidden exchanges of information between objects; or, what it conceptualizes as a metainterface. By bringing the tendency in artworks forward, the book aims to demonstrate how certain critical interfaces have an ability to reflect the deeper fissures within new technologies and the production of the work of art itself; an ability to show us an interface, after the interface has seemingly disappeared into ‘smart’ futures and new promises of anticipation, participation, and emancipation.

This book of electronic literature (e-lit) brings together pioneering and emerging women whose work has earned international impact and scholarly recognition. It extends a historical critical overview of the state of the field from the diverse perspectives of twenty-eight worldwide contributors. It illustrates the authors’ scholarly interests through discussion of creative practice as research, historical accounts documenting collections of women’s new media art and literary works, and art collectives. It also covers theoretical approaches and critical overviews, from feminist discourses to close readings and “close-distant-located readings” of pertinent works in the field. #WomenTechLit includes authors from Latin America, Russia, Austria, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the US.

(Source: Publisher's Blurb)

The literary self-portrait is a genre struggling with its own identity and its place in the general body of Western literature. Contributors to this particular literary form include St. Augustine, Bacon, Montaigne, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Barthes; the works, according to author Michel Beaujour, do not know how to designate themselves. Are they a valid form of written communication or are they a solipsistic exercise of little use to the reading community? Is the self-portrait merely a form of autobiography? Beaujour considers these questions and explores the self-portrait in careful detail, tracing its development from the Confessions, to the Essais, to its most recent manifestations in the 20th century.

In 1968, avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage exhibited Reunion, a chess performance that took place in Toronto. Whenever Duchamp or Cage moved a piece, it generated a musical note until the game was transformed into a symphony. Inspired by this performance, Irresponsible Mediums—poet and academic Aaron Tucker’s second full-length collection of poems—translates Duchamp’s chess games into poems using the ChessBard (an app co-created by Tucker and Jody Miller) and in the process, recreates Duchamp’s joyous approach to making art, while also generating startling computer-made poems that blend the analog and digital in strange and surprising combinations.

This book examines the convergent paths of the Internet and the American military, interweaving a history of the militarized Internet with analysis of a number of popular Hollywood movies in order to track how the introduction of the Internet into the war film has changed the genre, and how the movies often function as one part of the larger the Military-Industrial- Media-Entertainment Network and the Total War Machine. The book catalogues and analyzes representations of a militarized Internet in popular Hollywood cinema, arguing that such illustrations of digitally networked technologies promotes an unhealthy transhumanism that weaponizes the relationships between the biological and technological aspects of that audience, while also hierarchically placing the “human” components at the top. Such filmmaking and movie-watching should be replaced with a critical posthumanism that challenges the relationships between the audience and their technologies, in addition to providing critical tools that can be applied to understanding and potentially resist modern warfare.cu

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality--from the holograph manuscript to the printed book--Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts.

(Source: Publisher)