Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.
hand-drawn
“i made this. you play this. we are enemies.” is an art game, interactive digital poem which uses game levels built on screen shots from influential community based websites/portals. The game interface drives the poetic texts, the colliding and intersecting images, sounds, words, movements, a forever changing, reader built poetic wonderland. And using messy hand drawn elements, strange texts, sounds and multimedia layering, the artwork lets users play in the worlds hovering over and beneath what we browse, to exist outside/over their controlling constraints. Your arrow keys and space bar will guide you, with the occasional mouse click begging for attention. Each day the internet is humming with a million small interventions. From the humoresque mocking of community content sites like Fark, to the net gate keepers Yahoo and Google, partisan political portals like Huffington Post or the open source/file sharing ‘priates’ of Mininova, the web is an easy tool/weapon for meddling/influencing and sharing/forcing/alluring your opinion on whomever clicks. And yet this digiscape is a deceiving and uneasy place, with continual streams of generic expression/content, cute dogs and accident clips, knocking against an incredible range of political/social beliefs hidden beneath the screen. Even short sequences of words, titled links or blinking ads can reveal the strange, wondrous and treacherous.